SERGEANT YORK 
AND HIS PEOPLE 




SERGEANT ALVIN C. YORK 

"Marshal Foch, in decorating him, said- 'What you did was the 
greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all of the armies 
of Europe.' " 



SERGEANT YORK 
AND HIS PEOPLE 



' BY 
SAM K. COWAN 



Illustrations from Photographs 
Taken Especially for This Book 




FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY 

New York and London 
1922 






Copyright, 1922, by 
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY 

[Printed in the United States of America] 
Published in April, 1922 



Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Conrention of the 

Pan-American Republics and the United States 

August 11, 1910. 



M\ 15 1922 
g)C!.A661651 



To 
FLOY PASCAL COWAN 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED^ WITH A LOVE THAT WANES NOT, 
BUT GROWS AS THE YEARS ROLL ON 



CONTENTS 



PACK 



I. A Fight in the Forest of the 

Argonne 13 

II. A "Long Hunter" Comes to the 

Valley 67 

III. The People of the Mountains . . 107 

IV. The Molding of a Man . . . .141 
V. The People of Pall Mall . . . .179 

VI. Sergeant York's Own Story . . . 225 
VII. Two More Deeds of Distinction . . 261 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



SERGEANT ALVIN C. YORK Frontispiece 

Facing 
Page 

"It was from this home that Alvin went to war, and it 

was to it he returned" 32 

"He declined to barter the honors that came to him; 
turned all down, and went back to the little worried 
mother who was waiting for him in a hut in the 
mountains, to the old seventy-five acre farm that 
clings to one of the sloping sides of a sun-kissed 
valley in Tennessee" 48 

**The York spring — a brook in volume, the stream flows 
clear and cool from a low, rock-ribbed cave in the 
base of a mountain" 72 

**The 'Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf,' where 
Alvin was born and lives, which has been the 
home of his ancestors for more than a hundred 
years, is a level, fertile valley that is almost rec- 
tangular in form, around which seven mountains 
have grown to their maturity" 88 

"The bone and sinew of the army of General Jackson 
in his Indian campaigns and against the British at 
New Orleans were the riflemen of Tennessee and 
Kentucky" 1I2 

"The very difficulty of loading the cap and ball rifle, 
the time it took, taught its users to be accurate and 
not spend the shot" 128 

"Up the mountainside, above the York spring, a space 
was cleared for shooting matches where the prizes 
were beeves and turkeys, and where the men shot 
so accurately that the slender crossing of two knife- 
blade marks was the bull's-eye of the target" 152 



[9] 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Facing 
Page 

"Where the road tumbles down to the solid log cabin 
'Old Coonrod' Pile had built, to the spring and the 
York home. The roadway comes down from the 
top of 'The Knobs,' a thousand feet above, and it 
comes over rocks of high and low degree, a jolting, 
impressive journey for its traveler" l68 

"The people of Pall Mall live in farm houses that dot 
the valley and in cabins on the mountainsides. But 
the social meeting point is the general store of John 
Marion Rains. The storekeeper is sure to know 
whether the stranger seen passing along the road 
stopped at the Yorks' or went on to Possum Trot or 
Byrdstown" 192 

"Later I saw a little fellow of six years of age chasing 
a chicken that was barren of feathers over a yard 
that was barren of grass. When I accused him of 
maliciously picking that chicken, his face was a spot 
of smiles as he vigorously denied it" 208 

"From his father he inherited physical courage, from his 
mother moral courage — and both spent their lives 
developing those qualities of manhood in their boy" 240 

"The little church which sits by the road with no homes 
near it is the geographical as well as the religious 
center of the community — it is the heart of Pall 
Mall" 248 

"Before Sergeant York went to war he had given an 
option to his mountain sweetheart — she could have 
him for the takin' when he got back" 280 

Sergeant York, his bride and his mother, the guests of 
Governor Roberts of Tennessee and Mrs. Roberts 
at the Governor's Mansion 288 

"Back again at his home in the 'Valley of the Three 
Forks o' the Wolf,' he asked that the people give 
him no more gifts, but instead contribute the money 
to a fund to build simple, primary schools for the 
children of the mountains who had no schools. Of 
the fund not a dollar was to be for his personal 
use, nor for any effort he might put forth in its 
behalf" 292 



[10] 



SERGEANT ALVIN C. YORK 

From a cabin back in the mountains of 
Tennessee, forty-eight miles from the rail- 
road, a young man went to the World War. 
He was untutored in the ways of the world. 

Caught by the enemy in the cove of a 
hill in the Forest of Argonne, he did not 
run; but sank into the bushes and single- 
handed fought a battalion of German ma- 
chine gunners until he made them come 
down that hill to him with their hands in 
air. There were one hundred and thirty- 
two of them left, and he marched them, 
prisoners, into the American line. 

Marshal Foch, in decorating him, said, 
"What you did was the greatest thing 
accomplished by any private soldier of all 
of the armies of Europe." 

His ancestors were cane-cutters and In- 

1^2 



SERGEANT ALVIN C. YORK 

dian fighters. Their lives were rich in the 
romance of adventure. They were men of 
strong hate and gentle love. His people 
have lived in the simplicity of the pioneer. 

This is not a war-story, -but the tale of 
the making of a man. His ancestors were 
able to leave him but one legacy — an idea 
of American manhood. 

In the period that has elapsed since he 
came down from the mountains he has done 
three things — and any one of them would 
have marked him for distinction. 

Sam K. Cowan. 



[12] 



A FIGHT IN 
THE FOREST 
OF THE 
ARGONNE 




A Fight in the Forest of the Argonne 

UST to the north of Chatel Che- 
hery, in the Argonne Forest in 
France, is a hill which was known 
to the American soldiers as "Hill No. 223." 
Fronting its high wooded knoll, on the way 
to Germany, are three more hills. The one 
in the center is rugged. Those to the right 
and left are more sloping, and the one to 
the left — which the people of France have 
named "York's Hill" — turns a shoulder 
toward Hill No. 223. The valley which 
they form is only from two to three hun- 
dred yards wide. 

Early in the morning of the eighth of 
October, 1918, as a floating gray mist re- 
laxed its last hold on the tops of the trees 

[15] . 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

on the sides of those hills, the "All Amer- 
ica" Division — the Eighty-Second — poured 
over the crest of No. 223. Prussian Guards 
were on the ridge-tops across the valley, and 
behind the Germans ran the Decauville 
Railroad — the artery for supplies to a salient 
still further to the north which the Germans 
were striving desperately to hold. The sec- 
ond phase of the Battle of the Meuse- 
Argonne was on. 

As the fog rose the Americans "jumped 
oflf" down the wooded slope and the Ger- 
mans opened fire from three directions. 
With artillery they pounded the hillside. 
Machine guns savagely sprayed the trees 
under which the Americans were moving. 
At one point, where the hill makes a steep 
descent, the American line seemed to fade 
away as it attempted to pass. 

This slope, it was found, was being swept 
by machine guns on the crest of the hill to 

\l62 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

the left which faced down the valley. The 
Germans were hastily "planting" other ma- 
chine guns there. 

The Americans showered that hilltop 
with bullets, but the Germans were en- 
trenched. 

The sun had now melted the mist and 
the sky was cloudless. From the pits the 
Germans could see the Americans working 
their way through the timber. 

To find a place from which the Boche 
could be knocked away from those death- 
dealing machine guns and to stop the dig- 
ging of "fox holes" for new nests, a non- 
commissioned officer and sixteen men went 
out from the American line. All of them 
were expert rifle shots who came from the 
support platoon of the assault troops on the 
left. 

Using the forest's undergrowth to shield 
them, they passed unharmed through the 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

bullet-swept belt which the Germans were 
throwing around Hill No. 223, and reached 
the valley. Above them was a canopy of 
lead. To the north they heard the heavy 
cannonading of that part of the battle. 

When they passed into the valley they 
found they were within the range of another 
battalion of German machine guns. The 
Germans on the hill at the far end of the 
valley were lashing the base of No. 223. 

For their own protection against the bul- 
lets that came with the whip of a wasp 
through the tree-tops, the detachment went 
boldly up the enemy's hill before them. 

On the hillside they came to an old trench, 
which had been used in an earlier battle of 
the war. They dropped into it 

Moving cautiously, stopping to get their 
bearings from the sounds of the guns above 
them, they walked the trench in Indian file. 
It led to the left, around the shoulder of 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

the hill, and into the deep dip of a valley in 
the rear. 

Germans were on the hilltop across that 
valley. But the daring of the Americans 
protected them. The Germans were guard- 
ing the valleys and the passes and they were 
not looking for enemy in the shadow of the 
barrels of German guns. 

As the trench now led down the hill, 
carrying the Americans away from the gun- 
ners they sought, the detachment came out 
of it and took skirmish formation in the 
dense and tangled bushes. 

They had gone but a short distance when 
they stepped upon a forest path. Just be- 
low them were two Germans, with Red 
Cross bands upon their arms. At the sight 
of the Americans, the Germans dropped 
their stretcher, turned and fled around a 
curve. 

The sound of the shots fired after them 

D9] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

was lost in the clatter of the machine guns 
above. One of the Germans fell, but re- 
gained his feet, and both disappeared in 
the shrubs to the right. 

It was kill or capture those Germans to 
prevent exposure of the position of the in- 
vaders, and the Americans went after them. 

They turned off the path where they saw 
the stretcher-bearers leave it, darted through 
the underbrush, dodged trees and stumps 
and brushes. Jumping through the shrubs 
and reeds on the bank of a small stream, the 
Americans in the lead landed in a group of 
about twenty of the enemy. 

The Germans sprang to their feet in sur- 
prize. They were behind their own line of 
battle. Officers were holding a conference 
with a major. Private soldiers, in groups, 
were chatting and eating. They were be- 
fore a little shack that was the German ma- 
jor's headquarters, and from it stretched 

1^2 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

telephone wires. The Germans were not 
set for a fight 

Out from the brushwood and off the bank 
across the stream, one after another, came 
the Americans. 

It bewildered the Germans. They did 
not know the number of the enemy that had 
come upon them. As each of the ^'Buddies" 
landed, he sensed the situation, and pre- 
pared for an attack from any angle. Some 
of them fired at German soldiers whom they 
saw reaching for their guns. 

All threw up their hands, with the cry 
^'Kamerad!" when the Americans opened 
fire. 

About their prisoners the Americans 
formed in a semicircle as they forced them 
to disarm. At the left end of this crescent 
was Alvin York — a young six-foot moun- 
taineer, who had come to the war from "The 
Knobs of Tennessee." He knew nothing of 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

military tactics beyond the simple evolutions 
of the drill. Only a few days before had he 
first seen the flash of a hostile gun. But a 
rifle was as familiar to his hands as one of 
the fingers upon them. His body was ridged 
and laced with muscles that had grown to 
seasoned sinews from swinging a sledge in 
a blacksmith-shop. He had never seen the 
man or crowd of men of whom he was 
afraid. He had hunted in the mountains 
while forked lightning flashed around him. 
He had heard the thunder crash in mountain 
coves as loud as the burst of any German 
shell. He was of that type into whose brain 
and heart the qualm of fear never comes. 

The Americans were on the downstep of 
the hill with their prisoners on the higher 
ground. The major's headquarters had been 
hidden away in a thicket of young under- 
growth, and the Americans could see but a 
short distance ahead. 

1^1 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

As the semicircle formed with Alvin 
York on the left end, he stepped beyond the 
edge of the thicket — and what he saw up 
the hill surprized him. 

Just forty yards away was the crest, and 
along it was a row of machine guns — a 
battalion of them! 

The German gunners had heard the shots 
fired by the Americans in front of the 
major's shack, or they had been warned by 
the fleeing stretcher-bearers that the enemy 
was behind them. They were jerking at 
their guns, rapidly turning them around, for 
the nests had been masked and the muzzles 
of the guns pointed down into the valley at 
the foot of Hill No. 223, to sweep it when 
the Eighty-Second Division came out into 
the open. 

Some of the Germans in the gun-pits, 
using rifles, shot at York. The bullets 
''burned his face as they passed." He cried 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

a warning to his comrades which evidently 
was not heard, for when he began to shoot 
up the hill they called to him to stop as the 
Germans had surrendered. They saw — only 
the prisoners before them. 

There was no time for parley. York's 
second cry, "Look outl" could carry no ex- 
planation of the danger to those whose view 
was blinded by the thicket. The Germans 
had their guns turned. Hell and death were 
being belched down the hillside upon the 
Americans. 

At the opening rattle of these guns the 
German prisoners as if through a pre- 
arranged signal, fell flat to the ground, and 
the streams of lead passed over them. Some 
of the Americans prevented by the thicket 
from seeing that an attack was to be made 
upon them, hearing the guns, instinctively 
followed the lead of the Germans. But 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGONNE 

the onslaught came with such suddenness 
that those in the line of fire had no chance. 

The first sweep of the guns killed six and 
wounded three of the Americans. Death 
leaped through the bushes and claimed Cor- 
poral Murray Savage, Privates Maryan 
Dymowski, Ralph Weiler, Fred Ware- 
ing, William Wine and Carl Swanson. 
Crumpled to the ground, wounded, were 
Sergeant Bernard Early, who had been in 
command; Corporal William B. Cutting 
and Private Mario Muzzi. 

York, to escape the guns he saw sweeping 
toward him, had dived to the ground be- 
tween two shrubs. 

The fire of other machine guns was added 
to those already in action and streams of 
lead continued to pour through the thicket. 
But the toll of the dead and wounded of 
the Americans had been taken. 

The Germans kept their line of fire about 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

waist-high so they would not kill their own 
men, some of whom they could see grovel- 
ing on the ground. 

York had seen the murder of his pals in 
the first onset. He had heard some one say, 
^Xet's get out of here; we are in the Ger- 
man line!" Then all had been silence on 
the American side. 

German prisoners lay on the ground be- 
fore him, in view of the gunners on the hill- 
top. York edged around until he had a 
clear view of the gun-pits above him. The 
stalks of weeds and undergrowth were 
about him. 

There came a lull in the machine gun fire. 
Several Germans arose as though to come 
out of their pits and down the hill to see the 
battle's result. 

But on the American side the battle was 
just begun. York, from the brushes at the 
end of the thicket, "let fly." 

[^6] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

One of the Germans sprang upward, 
waved his arms above him as he began his 
flight into eternity. 

The others dropped back into their holes, 
and there was another clatter of machine 
guns and again the bullets slashed across the 
thicket. 

But there was silence on the American 
side. York waited. 

More cautiously, German heads began to 
rise above their pits. York moved his rifle 
deliberately along the line knocking back 
those heads that were the more venturesome. 
The American rifle shoots five times, and a 
clip was gone before the Germans realized 
that the fire upon them was coming from one 
point. 

They centered on that point. 

Around York the ground was torn up. 
Mud from the plowing bullets besmirched 
him. The brush was mowed away above 

[^7] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

and on either side of him, and leaves and 
twigs were falling over him. 

But they could only shoot at him. They 
were given no chance to take deliberate aim. 
As they turned the clumsy barrel of a ma- 
chine gun down at the fire-sparking point on 
the hillside a German would raise his head 
above his pit to sight it. Instantly backward 
along that German machine gun barrel 
would come an American bullet — crashing 
into the head of the Boche who manned the 
gun. 

The prisoners on the ground squirmed 
under the fire that was passing over them. 
Their bodies were in a tortuous motion. But 
York held them there; it made the gunners 
keep their fire high. 

Every shot York made was carefully 
placed. As a hunter stops in the forest and 
gazes straight ahead, his mind, receptive to 
the slightest movement of a squirrel or the 

[^8] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGONNE 

rustle of leaves in any of the trees before 
him, so this Tennessee mountaineer faced 
and fought that line of blazing machine guns 
on the ridge of the hill before him. His 
mind was sensitive to the point in the line 
that at that instant threatened a real danger, 
and instinctively he turned to it. 

Down the row of prisoners on the ground 
he saw the German major with a pistol in 
his hand, and he made the officer throw the 
gun to him. Later its magazine was found 
to have been emptied. 

He noted that after he shot at a gun-pit, 
there was a break in the line of flame at 
that point, and an interval would pass before 
that gun would again be manned and be- 
come a source of danger to him. He also real- 
ized that where there was a sudden break of 
ten or fifteen feet in the line of flame, and 
the trunk of a tree rose within that space, 
that soon a German gun and helmet would 

[^9] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

come peeking around the tree's trunk. A 
rifleman would try for him where the ma- 
chine guns failed. 

In the mountains of Tennessee Alvin York 
had won fame as one of the best shots with 
both rifle and revolver that those mountains 
had ever held, and his imperturbability was 
as noted as the keenness of his sight. 

In mountain shooting-matches at a range 
of forty yards — just the distance the row of 
German guns were from him — he would put 
ten rifle bullets into a space no larger than a 
man's thumb-nail. Since a small boy he 
had been shooting with a rifle at the bobbing 
heads of turkeys that had been tethered be- 
hind a log so that only their heads would 
show. German heads and German helmets 
loomed large before him. 

A battalion of machine guns is a military 
unit organized to give battle to a regiment 
of infantry. Yet, one man, a representative 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGONNE 

of America on that hillside on that October 
morning, broke the morale of a battalion of 
machine gunners made up from members 
of Germany's famous Prussian Guards. 
Down in the brush below the Prussians was 
a human machine gun they could not hit, 
and the penalty was death to try to locate 
him. 

As York fought, there was prayer upon 
his lips. He was an elder in a little church 
back in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' 
the Wolf" in the mountains of Tennessee. 
He prayed to God to spare him and to have 
mercy on those he was compelled to kill. 

When York shot, and a German soldier 
fell backward or pitched forward and re- 
mained motionless, York would call to 
them: 

"Well! Come on down r 

It was an earnest command in which there 
was no spirit of exultation or braggadocio. 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

He was praying for their surrender, so that 
he might stop killing them. 

His command, "Come down!'^ at times, 
above the firing, was heard in the German 
pits. They realized they were fighting one 
man, and could not understand the strange 
demand. 

When the fight began York was lying on 
the ground. But as the entire line of Ger- 
man guns came into the fight, he raised 
'himself to a sitting position so that his gun 
would have the sweep of all of them. 

When the Germans found they could not 
"get him" with bullets, they tried other 
tactics. 

Off to his left, seven Germans, led by a 
lieutenant, crept through the bushes. When 
about twenty yards away, they broke for him 
•with lowered bayonets. 

The clip of York's rifle was nearly empty. 
He dropped it and took his automatic pistol. 

[32] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

So calmly was he master of himself and so 
complete his vision of the situation that he 
selected as his first mark among the oncom- 
ing Germans the one farthest away. He 
knew he would not miss the form of a man 
at that distance. He wanted the rear men 
to fall first so the others would keep coming 
at him and not stop in panic when they saw 
their companions falling, and fire a volley 
at him. He felt that in such a volley his 
only danger lay. They kept coming, and 
fell as he shot. The foremost man, and the 
last to topple, did not get ten yards from 
where he started. Their bodies formed a 
line down the hillside. 

York resumed the battle with the machine 
guns. The German fire had "eased up'^ 
while the bayonet charge was on. The gun- 
ners paused to watch the grim struggle be- 
low them. 

The major, from among the prisoners, 

[33] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

crawled to York with an offer to order the 
surrender of the machine gunners. 

*^Do it!" was his laconic acceptance. But 
his vigilance did not lessen. 

To the right a German had crawled near- 
by. He arose and hurled a hand-grenade. 
It missed its objective and wounded one of 
the prisoners. The American rifle swung 
quickly and the grenade-thrower pitched 
forward with the grunt of a man struck 
heavily in the stomach pit. 

The German major blew his whistle. 

Out of their gun-pits the Germans came 
— around from behind trees — up from the 
brush on either side. They were unbuckling 
cartridge belts and throwing them and their 
side-arms away. 

York did not move from his position in 
the brush. About halfway down the hill as 
they came to him, he halted them, and he 
watched the gun-pits for the movement of 

[34] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

any one left skulking there. His eye went 
cautiously over the new prisoners to see that 
all side-arms had been thrown away. 

The surrender was genuine. 

There were about ninety Germans before 
him with their hands in air. This gave him 
over a hundred prisoners. 

He arose and called to his comrades, and 
several answered him. Some of the re- 
sponses came from wounded men. 

All of the Americans had been on York's 
right throughout the fight. The thicket had 
prevented them from taking any effective 
part. They were forced to protect them- 
selves from the whining bullets that came 
through the brush from unseen guns. They 
had constantly guarded the prisoners and 
shielded York from treachery. 

Seven Americans — Percy Beardsley, Joe 
Konotski, Thomas G. Johnson, Feodor Sak, 
Michael A. Sacina, Patrick Donahue and 

[35! 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

George W. Wills — came to him. Sergeant 
Early, Corporal Cutting and Private 
Muzzi, tho wounded, were still alive. 

He lined the prisoners up "by twos." 

His own wounded he put at the rear of 
the column, and forced the Germans to carry 
those who could not walk. The other Amer- 
icans he stationed along the column to hold 
the prisoners in line. 

Sergeant Early, shot through the body, 
was too severely wounded to continue in 
command. York was a corporal, but there 
was no question of rank for all turned to him 
for instructions. The Germans could not 
take their eyes off of him, and instantly com- 
plied with all his orders, given through the 
major, who spoke English. 

Stray bullets kept plugging through the 
branches of the trees around them. For the 
first time the Americans realized they were 
under fire from the Germans on the hill 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

back of them, whom they had seen when they 
came out of the deserted trench. The Ger- 
mans stationed there could not visualize the 
strange fight that was taking place behind a 
line of German machine guns, and they were 
withholding their fire to protect their own 
men. They were plugging into the woods 
with rifles, hoping to draw a return volley, 
and thus establish the American's position. 

To all who doubted the possibility of car- 
rying so many prisoners through the forest, 
or spoke of reprisal attacks to release them, 
York's reply was: 

"Let's get 'em out of here I" 

The German major looking down the long 
line of Germans, possibly planning some re- 
coup from the shame and ignominy of the 
surrender of so many of them, stepped up to 
York and asked: 

"How many men have you got?" 

The big mountaineer wheeled on him: 

[37I 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

"I got a-plenty!" 

And the major seemed convinced that the 
number of the Americans was immaterial as 
York thrust his automatic into the major's 
face and stepped him up to the head of the 
column. 

Among the captives v^ere three officers. 

These York placed around him to lead the 
prisoners — one on either side and the major 
immediately before him. In York's right 
hand swung the automatic pistol, with which 
he had made an impressive demonstration in 
the fight up the hill. The officers were told 
that at the first sign of treachery, or for a 
failure of the men behind to obey a com- 
mand, the penalty would be their lives; and 
the major was informed that he would be 
the first to go. 

With this formation no German skulking 
on the hill or in the bushes could fire upon 
York without endangering the officers. Sim- 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGONNE 

ilar protection was given all of the Ameri- 
cans acting as escort. 

Up the hill York started the column. 
From the topography of the land he knew 
there were machine guns over the crest that 
had had no part in the fight. 

Straight to these nests he marched them. 
'As the column approached, the major was 
forced by York to command the gunners to 
surrender. 

Only one shot was fired after the march 
began. At one of the nests, a German, see- 
ing so many Germans as prisoners and so 
few of the enemy to guard them — all of 
them on the German firing-line with ma- 
chine gun nests around them — refused to 
throw down his gun, and showed fight. 

York did not hesitate. 

The remainder of that gun^s crew took 
their place in line, and the major promised 
York there would be no more delays in the 

[39I 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

surrenders if he would kill no more of 
them. 

As a great serpent the column wound 
among the trees on the hilltop swallowing 
the crews of German machine guns. 

After the ridge had been cleared, four 
machine gun-nests were found down the 
hillside. 

It took all the woodcraft the young moun- 
taineer knew to get to his own command. 
They had come back over the hilltop and 
were on the slope of the valley in which 
the Eighty-Second Division was fighting. 
They were now in danger from both Ger- 
man and American guns. 

York listened to the firing, and knew the 
Americans had reached the valley — and 
that some of them had crossed it. Where 
their line was running he could not de- 
termine. 

He knew if the Americans saw his column 

U^3 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGONNE 

of German uniforms they were in danger — 
captors and captives alike — of being anni- 
hilated. At any moment the Germans from 
the two hilltops down the valley — to check 
the Eighty-Second Division's advance — 
might lay a belt of bullets across the course 
they traveled. 

Winding around the cleared places and 
keeping in the thickly timbered section of 
the hillslope whenever it was possible, 
Sergeant York worked his way toward the 
American line. 

In the dense woods the German major 
made suggestions of a path to take. As York 
was undecided which one to choose, the 
major's suggestion made him go the other 
one. Frequently the muzzle of York's au- 
tomatic dimpled the major's back and he 
quickened his step, slowed up, or led the 
column in the direction indicated to him, 
without turning his head and without in- 

u7] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

quiry as to the motive back of York's 
commands. 

Down near the foot of the hill, near the 
trench they had traveled a short while be- 
fore, York answered the challenge to 
^^Haltl" 

He stepped out so his uniform could be 
seen, and called to the Americans challeng- 
ing him, and about to fire on the Germans, 
that he was "bringing in prisoners.'* 

The American line opened for him to 
pass, and a wild cheer went up from the 
Doughboys when they saw the column of 
prisoners. Some of them "called to him to 
know" if he had the "whole damned 
German army." 

At the foot of the hill in an old dugout 
an American P. C. had been located, and 
York turned in his prisoners. 

The prisoners were officially counted by 
Lieut. Joseph A. Woods, Assistant Division 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

Inspector, and there were 132 of them, three 
of the number were officers and one with 
the rank of major. 

When the Eighty-Second Division passed 
on, officers of York's regiment visited the 
scene of the fight and they counted 25 Ger- 
mans that he had killed and 35 machine 
guns that York had not only silenced but 
had unmanned, carrying the men back with 
him as prisoners. 

When York was given "his receipt for the 
prisoners," an incident happened that shows 
the true knightliness of character of this 
untrained mountaineer. 

It was but a little after ten o'clock in the 
morning. The Americans had a hard day's 
fighting ahead of them. Somewhere out in 
the forest York's own company — Company 
G — and his own regiment — the 328th In- 
fantry — were fighting. He made inquiry, 

but no one could direct him to them. He 
— — 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

turned to the nearest American officer, sa- 
luted and reported, ^^Ready for duty." 

What he had done was to him but a part 
of the work to be done that day. 

But York was assigned to the command of 
his prisoners, to carry them back to a deten- 
tion camp. The officers were held by the 
P. C. — for an examination and grilling on 
the plans of the enemy. 

Whenever they could the private soldiers 
among the prisoners gathered close to York, 
now looking to him for their personal safety. 

On the way to the detention camp the col- 
umn was shelled by German guns from one 
of the hilltops. York maneuvered them and 
put them in double quick time until they 
were out of range. 

Late in the afternoon, back of the three 
hills that face Hill No. 223, the ''All Ameri- 
ca" Division "cut" the Decauville Railroad 
that supplied a salient to the north that the 

[44] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

Germans were striving desperately to hold. 
As they swept on to their objective they 
found the hill to the left of the valley, that 
turns a shoulder toward No. 223 — which 
the people of France have named ^^York's 
Hill" — cleared of Germans, and on its crest, 
silent and unmanned machine guns. 

Americans returned and buried on the 
hillside — beside a thicket, near a shack that 
had been the German officer's headquarters 
— six American soldiers. They placed 
wooden crosses to mark the graves and on 
the top of the crosses swung the helmets 
the soldiers had worn. 

Out from the forest came the story of 
what York had done. The men in the 
trenches along the entire front were told of 
it. Not only in the United States, but in 
Great Britain, France and Italy, it electri- 
fied the public. From the meager details 
the press was able to carry, for the entire 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

Entente firing-line was ablaze and a sur- 
render was being forced upon Germany, and 
York's division was out in the Argonne still 
fighting its way ahead, the people could but 
wonder how one man was able to silence a 
battalion of machine guns and bring in so 
many prisoners. 

Major-General George B. Duncan, com- 
mander of the Eighty-Second Division, and 
officers of York's regiment knew that history 
had been made upon that hillside. By per- 
sonal visits of the regiment's officers to the 
scene, by measurements, by official count of 
the silent guns and the silent dead, by affi- 
davits from those who were with York, the 
record of his achievement was verified. 

Major-General C. P. Summerall, before 
the officers of York's regiment, said to him : 

"Your division commander has reported 
to me your exceedingly gallant conduct dur- 
ing the operations of your division in the 

U6] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGONNE 

Meuse-Argonne Battle. I desire to express 
to you my pleasure and commendation for 
the courage, skill, and gallantry which you 
displayed on that occasion. It is an honor 
to command such soldiers as you. Your con- 
duct reflects great credit not only upon the 
American army, but upon the American 
people. Your deeds will be recorded in the 
history of this great war and they will live 
as an inspiration not only to your comrades 
but to the generations that will come after 
us." 

General John J. Pershing in pinning the 
Congressional Medal of Honor upon him 
— the highest award for valor the United 
States Government bestows — called York 
the greatest civilian soldier of the war. 

Marshal Foch, bestowing the Croix de 
Guerre with Palm upon him, said his feat 
was the World War's most remarkable in- 
dividual achievement. 

[473 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

A deed that is done through the natural 
use of a great talent seems to the doer of the 
deed the natural thing to have done. A sin- 
cere response to appreciation and praise, 
made by those endowed with real ability, 
usually comes cloaked in a genuine modesty. 

At his home in the ^'Valley of the Three 
Forks o' the Wolf," after the war was over, 
I asked Alvin York how he came to be 
^^Sergeant York." 

"Well," he said, as he looked earnestly 
at me, "you know we were in the Argonne 
Forest twenty-eight days, and had some 
mighty hard fighting in there. A lot of our 
boys were killed off. Every company has 
to have so many sergeants. They needed a 
sergeant; and they jes' took me." 

In the summer of 1917 when Alvin York 
was called to war, he was working on the 
farm for $25 a month and his midday meal, 
walking to and from his work. He was 

[48] 




"He declined to barter the honors that came to him, turned all down, 
and went back to the little worried mother who was waiting for him 
in a hut in the mountains, to the old seventy-five-acre farm that 
clings to one of the sloping sides of a sun-kissed valley in Tennessee." 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

helping to support his widowed mother with 
her family of eleven. When he returned to 
this country to be mustered out of service 
he had traveled among the soldiers of 
France the guest of the American Expedi- 
tionary Force, so the men in the lines could 
see the man who single-handed had captured 
a battalion of machine guns, and he bore the 
emblems of the highest military honors con- 
ferred for valor by the governments compos- 
ing the Allies. 

At New York he was taken from the 
troop-ship when it reached harbor and the 
spontaneous welcome given him there and 
at Washington was not surpassed by the pre- 
arranged demonstrations for the Nation's 
distinguished foreign visitors. 

The streets of those cities were lined with 
people to await his coming and police pa- 
trols made way for him. The flaming ^ed 
of his hair, his young, sunburned, weather- 

[49] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

ridged face with its smile and its strength, 
the worn service cap and uniform, all 
marked him to the crowds as the man they 
sought. 

On the shoulders of members of the New 
York Stock Exchange he was carried to the 
floor of the E.xhange and business was sus- 
pended. When he appeared in the gallery 
of the House of Representatives at Wash- 
ington, the debate was stopped and the mem- 
bers turned to cheer him. A sergeant in 
rank, he sat at banquets as the guest of honor 
with the highest officials of the Army and 
Navy and the Government on either side. 
Wherever he went he heard the echo of the 
valuation which Marshal Foch and General 
Pershing placed upon his deeds. 

Many business propositions were made 
to him. Some were substantial and others 
strange, the whimsical offerings of enthused 
admirers. 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGONNE 

Among them were cool fortunes he could 
never earn at labor. 

Taking as a basis the money he was paid 
for three months on the farm in the summer 
before he went to France, he would have., 
had to work fifty years to earn the amount 
he was offered for a six-weeks' theatrical en-) 
gagement. For the rights to the story of his 
life a single newspaper was willing to give 
him the equivalent of thirty-three years. He 
would have to live to be over three hundred T 
years of age to earn at the old farm wage j 
the sum motion picture companies offered,/ 
as a guarantee. 

He turned all down, and went back to the 
little worried mother who was waiting for 
him in a hut in the mountains, to the gazelle- 
like mountain girl whose blue eyes had 
haunted the shades of night and the shadows 
of trees, to the old seventy-five acre farm that 
clings to one of the sloping sides of a sun- 



) 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

kissed valley in Tennessee. He refused to 
capitalize his fame, his achievements that 
were crowded into a few months in the army 
of his country. 

There was one influence that was ever 
guiding him. The future had to square to 
the principles of thought and action he had 
laid down for himself and that he had fol- 
lowed since he knelt, four years before, at 
I a rough-boarded altar in a little church in 
^ the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the 
Wolf," whose belfry had been calling, ap- 
pealing to him since childhood. 

Admiral Albert Cleaves, who com- 
manded the warship convoy for the troop- 
ships, himself a Tennesseean, made a pre- 
diction which came true. "The guns of 
Argonne and the batteries of welcome of 
the East were not to be compared to those 
to be turned loose in York's home state." 

The people of Tennessee filled depots, 

C5^1 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

streets and tabernacles to welcome him. 
Gifts awaited him, which ranged from a 
four-hundred acre farm raised by public 
subscriptions by the Rotary Clubs and news- 
papers, to blooded stock for it, and almost 
every form of household furnishings that 
could add to man's comfort. It took a ware- 
room at Nashville and the courtesies of the 
barns of the State Fair Association to hold 
the gifts. 

He was made a Colonel by the Governor 
of Tennessee, and appointed a member of his 
staff. He was elected to honorary member- 
ship in many organizations. As far away as 
Spokane the ''Red Headed Club" thought 
him worthy of their membership ''by virtue 
of the color of his hair and in recognition 
of his services to this, our glorious country.'^ 

The nations of Europe for whom he 
fought had not forgotten nor had they 
ceased to honor him. After he had returned 

C53] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

to the mountains of Tennessee, another cita- 
tion came from the French Government for 
a military award that had been made him, 
and in a ceremony at the capital of Tennes- 
see the Italian Government conferred upon 
him the Italian Cross of War. 

The ''Valley of the Three Forks o' the 
[Wolf," where Alvin York was born and lives, 
I which has been the home of his ancestors 
I for more than a hundred years, is a level fer- 
tile valley that is almost a rectangle in form. 
Three mountains rising on the north and 
south and west enclose it, while to the 
east four mountains jumble together, form- 
ing the fourth side. It seems that each of 
these is striving for a place by the valley. 
It IS down the passes of these mountains 
on the east that the three branches of the 
Wolf River run, and it is their meeting and 
commingling that gave the quaint name to 
the valley. 

L54] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

The forks of the Wolf rush down the 
passes, but the river runs lazily through the 
valley. It flows beside a cornfield, then 
wanders over to a meadow of clover or into 
a patch of sugar-cane, turning the while 
from side to side as the varying mountain 
vistas come into view. At the far end where 
it is pushed over the mill dam and out of 
the valley, the Wolf roars protestingly; then 
rushes on to the Cun^erland River a silver 
line between the mountains. 

Pall Mall, the village, is co-extensive with 
the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." 
As a stranger first sees Pall Mall it is but a 
half-mile of the mountain roadway that runs 
from Jamestown, the county seat of Fentress 
county, to Byrdstown, the county seat of 
Pickett. 

The roadway comes down from the top 
of "The Knobs," a thousand feet above, and 
it comes over rocks of high and low degree, 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

a jolting, impressive journey for its traveler. 
It reaches the foot of the mountain along one 
of the prongs of the Wolf, crosses them at 
the base of the eastern mountains and passes 
on to the northern side of the river. 

At the post office of Pall Mall, which is 
also the store of 'Taster" Pile — a frame 
building upon stilts to allow an unob- 
structed flow of the Wolf when on a winter 
rampage — the road turns at right angles to 
the west. Through fields of corn it goes, 
across a stretch of red clover to the clump 
of forest trees which is the schoolhouse 
grounds and in which nestles the little 
church that has played such a prominent 
part in the life of the village. Then the 
road goes beside the graveyard and again 
through corn to the general store of John 
Marion Rains, which with five houses in 
sight — and one of these the York home — 
!marks the western confine of Pall Mall. 

[56] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

One can be in the center of Pall Mall and 
not know it, for the residents live in farm 
houses that dot the valley and in cabins on 
the mountainsides. The little church, which 
sits by the road with no homes near it, is the 
geographical as well as the religious center 
of the community — it is the heart of Pall 
Mall. 

Passing the Rains store the roadway 
tumbles down to the York's big spring. A 
brook in volume the stream flows clear and 
cool from a low rock-ribbed cave in the base 
of the mountain. 

Across the spring branch, up the moun- 
tainside in a clump of honey-suckle and 
roses and apple trees is the home to which 
Sergeant York returned. 

It is a two-room cabin. The boxing is of 
rough boards as are the unplaned narrow 
strips of batting covering the cracks. There 
is a chimney at one end and in one room is a 

[57] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

fireplace. The kitchen is a ^4ean-to" and 
the only porch is on the rear, the width of 
the kitchen-dining room. The porch is for 
service and work, railed partly with a board 
for a shelf, which holds the water-bucket, 
the tin wash basin and burdens brought in 
from the farm. 

Parts of the walls of the two rooms arc 
papered with newspapers and catalog 
pages; the rough rafters run above. The 
uncovered floor is of wide boards, worn 
smooth in service, chmked to keep out the 
blasts of winter. 

The porch in the rear is on a level with 
the mountainside. To care for the moun- 
tain's slope a front stoop was built. The 
sides of it are scantlings and the steps are I 
narrow boards. 

The house has been painted by Poverty; 
but the home is warmed and lit by a moun- 
tain mother's love. The front stoop is a 

[58] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

wooden ladder with flat steps but the en- 
trance to the home is an arbor of honey- 
suckle and roses. 

On summer nights the York boys sat on 
that stoop and sang, and their voices floated 
on the moonbeams out over the valley. The 
little mother '^pottered" about, with ever a 
smile on her face for her boys. They were 
happy. 

It was from this home that Alvin went 
to war, and it was to it he returned. 

Visitors know, and it is well for others to 
realize, that Pall Mall and the "Valley of 
the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are back 
among the rising ranges of the Cumberland 
Mountains fo4:ty^igl^^iiles from the rail- 
road. 

Alvin York came from a line of ancestors 
who were, cane-cutters and Indian fighters. 
The earliest ancestor of whom he has knowl- 
edge was a "Long Hunter," who with a rifle 

159] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

upon his shoulder strode into the Valley of 
the Wolf and homesteaded the river bottom- 
lands. Here his people lived far from the 
traveled paths. Marooned in their moun- 
tain fastnesses, they clung to the customs 
and the traditions of the past. Their life 
was simple, and their sports quaint. They 
held shooting-matches on the mountainside, 
enjoyed "log-rollings" and "corn-huskings.'^ 
Strong in their loves and in their hates, they 
feared God, but feared no man. The Civil 
War swept over the valley and left splotches 
of blood. 

Friends of Sergeant York, knowing that 
the history of his people was rich in story, 
and that the public was waiting, wanting to 
know more of the man the German army 
could not run, nor make surrender — and in- 
stead had to come to him — urged that his 
story be told. 

He had been mustered out of the army 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

and come back to the valley wanting to pick 
up again the dropped thread of his former 
life. He was striving earnestly and prayer- 
fully to blot from recurrent memory that 
October morning scene on ''York's Hiir^ in 
France. 

His friends and neighbors at Pall Mall 
waited eagerly for his return. They wanted 
to hear from his own lips the story of his 
fight. 

No man of the mountains was ever given 
the home-coming that was his. It was made 
the reunion of the people, with the neigh- 
bors the component parts of one great 
family. 

When home again, Alvin wanted no es- 
pecial deference shown him. He wished to 
be again just one of them, to swing himself 
upon the counter at the general store and 
talk with them as of old. He had much to 
tell from his experience, but always it was 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

of other incidents than the one that made 
him famous. 

Months passed. He lived in that moun- 
tain cabin with his little mother, whose coun- 
sel has ever influenced him, and yet not once 
did he mention to her that he had a fight in 
the Forest of Argonne. 

His consent was gained for the publica- 
tion of the story of his people, but it was 
with the pronounced stipulation that "it be 
told right.'* 

Weeks afterward — for I had gone to live 
awhile among his people — the two of us 
were sitting upon the rugged rock, facing to 
the cliff above the York spring, talking 
about the fight in France. 

He told of it hesitatingly, modestly. Some 
of the parts was simply the confirmation of 
assembled data; much of it, denial of pub- 
lished rumor and conjecture — before the 
story came out as a whole. 

[6^] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

I asked the meaning of his statement that 
he would not ''mind the publication if the 
story were done right." 

''Well," he said with his mountain drawl, 
*'I don't want you bearing down too much 
on that killing part. Tell it without so much 
of that!" 

A rock was picked up and hurled down 
the mountain. 

I then understood why the little mother 
was "jes' a-waiting till Alvin gits ready to 
talk." I understood why the son did not 
wish to be the one to bring into his mother's 
mind the picture of that hour in France 
when men were falling before his gun. I 
saw the reason he had for always courteously 
avoiding talking of the scene with any one. 

"But," and he turned with that smile that 
wins him friends, "I just can't help chuck- 
ling at that German major. I sure had him 
bluffed." 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

According to the code of mountain con- 
versation there followed a silence. Another 
rock bounded off the sapling down the cliff. 

^'You should have seen the major," he re- 
sumed, "move on down that hill whenever 
I pulled down on him with that old Colt. 
'Goose-step it', I think they call it. He was 
so little! His back so straight! And all 
huffed up over the way he had to mind me.'' 

I had watched the rocks as they went down 
the cliff and it seemed nearly every one of 
them bounced off the same limb. I com- 
mented on the accuracy of his eye. 

"Aw! I wasn't throwing at that sapling, 
but at — that — leaf." 

He straightened up and threw more care- 
fully; and the leaf floated down to the wa- 
ters of the York spring. 

Down by the spring I met the little mother 
bringing a tin bucket to the stone milk-house 
which nature had built. Her slender, droolp- 

f64] 



IN THE FOREST OF ARGON NE 

ing figure, capped by the sunbonnet she al- 
ways wore, reached just to the shoulder of 
her son, as he placed his arm protectingly 
about her. 

I asked if she were not proud of that boy 
of hers. 

"Yes," she answered, with pride in every 
line of her sweet though wrinkled face, "I 
am proud of all of them — all of my eight 
boysT* 



[65] 



II 

A ''LONG 
HUNTER'' 
COMES TO 
THE VALLEY 




II 

A "Long Hunter" Comes to the Valley 

HE "Valley of the Three Forks 
o' the Wolf" is more than a fer- 
tile space between two mountain 
ranges. It is a rectangular basin of verdure 
and beauty in the glow of a Southern sun, 
around which seven mountains have grown 
to their maturity. Generously, for uncounted 
years, this family of the hills has given to 
the valley the surplus products of their tim- 
bered slopes, and the Wolf River has gone 
through the valley distributing the wealth 
the mountains brought in, brightening and 
adding touches of beauty here and there, 
ever singing as she came down to her daily 
task. The mountains and the river have 
worked unceasingly together to make the 
spot a place of comfort and beauty. 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

On the bare rock-shoulder of one of these 
mountains, in the closing years of the eigh- 
teenth century, stood one of the last of the 
'Xong Hunters," that race of stout-hearted, 
sturdy-legged men who when the Atlantic 
Coast was dotted with sparsely settled Brit- 
ish colonies climbed the mountains and went 
down the western slopes on the long hunts in 
the unknown land that lay below. They 
were the pioneers of the pioneers, who in 
their wanderings found a spot rich in game, 
in nuts and soil — such a home as they had 
wished — and they beckoned back for their 
families and their friends. 

The figure upon the rock-ledge rested 
upon a long, muzzle-loading, flint-lock 
rifle as he looked out over the valley. His 
legs were wrapped in crudely tanned hides 
made from game he had killed. His cap was 
of coon-skin. His search for adventure and 
game had carried him across the crest of the 



A ''LONG HUNTER' 



Cumberlands and along many weary, lonely 
miles of the western wooded slopes of those 
mountains. Years afterward he is known to 
have said that the view from the crag that 
day was the most appealing in its calmness 
and its beauty that he had seen upon his 
hunts. 

Below him stretched a grove of trees. 
Their waving tops told of their size and to 
his trained woodsman's eye the quivering 
oval leaves were the leaves of the walnut. 
It was assurance that the soil was rich. And 
through the length of the valley, twisted ir- 
regularly, lay a wide ribbon of saffron cane, 
from which at times the silver surface of a 
stream showed — a further evidence of the 
soil's fertility. Over the western edge of 
this tableland of green and yellow and sil- 
ver the mountains cast a shadow of purple 
and the sun filtered slanting rays through the 
forest slopes on the north and east. 



C71] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

Down the mountainside he came, and into 
the valley; never to leave it, except when in 
bartering with the Indians he went to their 
camping-places for furs, or in the years of 
prosperity that followed he was upon a 
trading mission. 

He first made his way through ^Walnut 
Grove" in search of the caned banks of the 
river. As he pushed through the reeds that 
swayed above him he came suddenly upon a 
well-beaten path. In its dust were the prints 
of deer-hoofs, and he followed them. The 
path threaded the length of the valley beside 
the river's winding course, but he knew from 
the crests of the mountains above him the 
direction he was taking. 

It led him to the base of one of these 
mountains, to a spring which flowed clear 
and cool, a brook in size, from a low rock- 
ribbed cave. 

By the spring he cooked his meal. His 

[7^1 



A ''LONG HUNTER 



bread was baked upon a hot stone and he 
drank water from a terrapin shell. As he 
ate his meal there came the sound of break- 
ing cane, a familiar welcomed vibration to 
a hunter. A stone, that is still by the spring 
side, was used as a shelter and a resting- 
place for the rifle, and a deer fell as it 
stopped, astonished at the curling smoke that 
rose from its watering-place. 

This was the first meal of the white man 
at the York spring or in the "Valley of the 
Three Forks o' the Wolf," and for more than 
fifty years the hunter lived within a hundred 
yards of where he camped that day. He was 
Conrad Pile — or "Old Coonrod," as he is 
known, the descriptive adjectives and by- 
name ever coupled as though one word. He 
w^as the great-great-grandfather of Sergeant 
Alvin Cullom York, and the earliest ancestor 
of which he has account. 

Above the spring in the rock-facing of 



C73] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

the cliff is a large cave. Here Coonrod Pile 
spread a bed of leaves and made his home. 
The camp-fire was kept burning and its 
smoke was seen by other hunters, and Pear- 
son Miller, Arthur Frogge, John Riley and 
Moses Poor came to Coonrod in the valley, 
and they too made their homes there, and 
Pall Mall was founded and descendants of 
these men are today eighty per cent of the 
residents in the ^^Valley of the Three Forks 
o' the Wolf." 

This is but one of the many valley settle- 
ments made by "Long Hunters" in the Ap- 
palachian Mountains. Adventurous families 
in the last days of the Colonies and in the 
years that came after the Revolution, fol- 
lowed the hunters, and log cabins and 
"cleared spaces" appeared in the valleys and 
on the mountainsides. And from them 
sprang another race of long hunters who 
went out from the mountains down into the 

[74] 



A ''LONG HUNTER 



valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, re- 
turning to tell of the land and the game they 
had found. Not far from Pall Mall, as the 
crow would rise and journey, is a carving 
upon a tree that is believed to historically 
mark the path of the most noted of the 
"Long Hunters," and it says: 

"D Boon CillED a BAR On Tree in ThE 
yEAR 1760." 

Emigrants of those days settled as Coon- 
rod Pile and his companions took up their 
"squatter's rights" in the Valley o' the 
Wolf." As canvas - covered mountain- 
schooners carrying families of the settlers 
moved westward they followed the trails of 
the hunters and stopped where it appealed 
to them. Wagon-tracks grew into roads as 
the travel increased. And the roads unvary- 
ingly led to the passes and the gaps in the 
mountains that offered the least resistance 
to progress. So scattered throughout the 



[75] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

ranges of the Appalachians are many homes 
and settlements off from the old, beaten, 
wagon-trails, far distant from the railroads 
of to-day, reached only over rocky, rarely- 
worked roadways. 

Those who dwell there are the direct de- 
scendants of pioneers. Here they had lived 
for generations unmolested by the rush and 
hurry for homes to the more fertile West. 
Often in those days a mountain neighbor was 
forty miles away, and they were long rugged 
miles. To-day a traveler distant on the moun- 
tainside can be recognized by the mountain- 
eers while the man's features are still un- 
traceable, by the droop of a hat or a pecu- 
liar walk, or amble of the mule he rides. 
In the case of any traveler along those re- 
mote roads the odds are long that the man, 
his father, his grandfather — as far back as 
anyone can remember — all were born and 
raised in the neighborhood, and the neigh- 

[76] 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



borhood is the valleys and the cleared spaces 
on the sides of all the mountains near 
around. 

So the mountaineer of to-day is the trans- 
planted colonist of the eighteenth century; 
he is the backwoodsman of the days of An- 
drew Jackson; his life has the hospitality, 
the genuineness and simplicity of the pio- 
neer. It has been said of the residents of 
the Cumberland Mountains that they are the 
purest Anglo-Saxons to be found to-day and 
not even England can produce so clear a 
strain. 

The mountain families have intermarried 
and because of the inaccessibility of their 
homes have remained marooned in their 
mountain fastnesses. They are Anglo-Saxon 
in their blood and their customs. They are 
Colonial-Americans in their speech and 
credences. 

They have a love for daring that comes 



1771 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

from the wildness and freedom of their sur- 
roundings. They have a directness of mind 
that is the result of unconscious training. 
They must be sure of the firmness of each 
footstep they take, and it is through and 
past obstructions that they locate their game. 
They are keen of observation, for the move- 
ment of a shadow or the swaying of a weed 
may mean the presence of a fox, or a drop- 
ping hickory-nut indicate the flight of a 
squirrel. They are physically brave, for 
it is the inheritance of all who live in moun- 
tains. Their word is accepted, for they wish 
the good will of the few among whom they 
must spend their lives; and to them lying is 
a form of cowardice. 

They are sensitive because they are ob- 
servant and realize they have been criticized 
and misunderstood — misclassed as a rare 
race of "moonshiners" and "feudists." 

Quickly and clearly they see through any 

[78] 



A "LONG HUNTER'' 



veneer of democracy the stranger may as- 
sume, to conceal an assumption of superior- 
ity. Yet for the stranger on the roadside, 
in answer to the halloo at their gate, the 
mountaineers are willing to go out of their 
way to do a favor, and they will cheerfully 
share such food and comforts as they may 
have, with any man. But they give their 
confidence only in proportion to demonstra- 
tions of manhood and genuineness, and as 
humanists they are not in a hurry. If there 
is an aura of caste, the distinctions must 
be created by those who have come as 
strangers into the mountains and not by 
the mountaineer. 

They know they are not ignorant, except 
as everyone is ignorant who lacks contact 
with new customs and changes in world 
progress. They are fully cognizant of their 
lack of that knowledge which ^'comes only 
out of a book.'' But whatever their educa- 



[79] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

tional shortcomings, no one has ever laid 
at their door the charge of stupidity. 

Raised in nature's school they are mas- 
ters of its non-elective course. They know 
by the arc the baying hounds make the size 
of the circle the fox will take and where to 
intercept him. They can tell by the distance 
up the mountain's side where the dogs are 
running whether the fox is red or gray. 
They know by the sound a rock makes as it 
is dropped into the stream the depth of the 
ford. They have even a classical finish to 
their woodland schooling and they find a 
pleasure in noting that the bullfrog sits 
with his back to the water as the moon rises 
and faces it as the moon sets. 

They know the signs of changing weather 
that will affect their crops. The tints of 
the clouds that float above them convey a 
meaning. There are cause and effect in the 
wind that continues in one direction. They 

[S^2 



A "LONG HUNTER'' 



watch the actions of wild animals and fowls, 
and they are wise enough to attribute to 
beast and bird an intuitive protective sense 
superior to their own. They note when the 
moss has grown heavier on the north side 
of the tree. 

The steadiness of their poise and their 
silence in the presence of strangers is not due 
to moroseness or the absence of active 
thought. They have learned in the woods, if 
they are to be successful in their hunts, to 
be personally as unobtrusive as possible, 
often to remain motionless, and all the while 
to watch and listen alertly. Whenever they 
can be of real assistance, no one can more 
quickly or more generously respond. 

They have their own standard of values 
in personal intercourse, and they can wait 
patiently and in impressive silence. They 
are always willing for someone else to hold 
the spotlight on their rural stage. 



[8i] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

About themselves they are naturally taci- 
turn, and public and unfriendly criticism has 
been proved to be a hazardous diversion. If 
the thought and comment of the stranger 
upon the mountaineer could be compared 
with the keen and often humorous analysis 
of the stranger the score would be found in 
surprizing frequency on the side of the calm 
and silent mountaineer. 

They give but little heed to the clothes a 
man wears but look clear-eyed at the man 
within the clothes. They have no criticism 
for the way a man says his say, so he has 
something to say. A noted college professor, 
himself a mountain boy, maintains: 

"I would rather hear a boy say *I seed' 
when he had really seen something, than to 
hear a boy say *I saw' when he had not seen 
it." 

Old Coonrod Pile lived in the valley 
until his life spanned from the days when it 



A ''LONG HUNTER 



was a hunting-ground of the Indians to the 
time when he can be remembered by some 
of the men and women now living in Pall 
Mall, who knew him as the most influential 
man of his time in the section, the owner of 
the river-bottom farm land, vast acres of 
hardwood timber, a general store and a flour 
mill worked by his slaves — a man grown to 
such enormous size and weight that in his 
last days he went about his farm and to 
oversee his workers in a two-wheeled cart 
pulled by oxen. 

Those of the valley who now remember 
him were children when he died, for he was 
born on March 16, 1766, and his death 
occurred on October 14, 1849. 

He saw his valley home changed from a 
part of the State of Franklin to a part of 
the State of Kentucky, then to Tennessee, 
and the abstracts to the deeds for land he 
owned show that Pall Mall was first in 



[833 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

iGranger county, later in Overton and finally 
iin Fentress county as the State of Tennessee 
developed. Pall Mall is but seven miles 
from the Kentucky line, and for many years 
Coonrod thought he had taken up his resi- 
dence within the Kentucky border. 

Settlers of those days in leaving the Caro- 
linas and Virginia traveled usually due west 
in search for a new home. It was this belief 
that he had settled in Kentucky that has led 
many to the opinion that Coonrod's former 
home was in Virginia. Others, without more 
definite knowledge for foundation, main- 
tain that as he settled in Tennessee he had 
lived in North Carolina. The written word 
was rarely used and the stories of the earlier 
days in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' 
the Wolf" are tradition. 

In a newly settled territory a man's birth- 
place and antecedents are facts immaterial 
to the community's welfare and many inci- 

\M1 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



dents historical in nature concerning Old 
Coonrod have been lost in the waste-basket 
of forgetfulness and no one now at Pall Mall 
has "heard tell of jes' where he come from." 
Yet some readily say that he came from 
"over yonder," and they point back across 
the mountains toward North Carolina. 

In the first map of Tennessee, made by 
Daniel Smith, there is a dip in the northern 
boundary of the state line where Fentress 
county is located. But this was found to be 
an error of survey and later corrected. The 
surveyors of those days were men of cour- 
tesy and accommodation, for in the estab- 
lishment of the Tennessee-Virginia line they 
surveyed around the southern boundary of 
the farm of a hospitable host and left his 
lands in Virginia because the old fellow 
maintained he had never had any health 
except in the mountains of Virginia. 

That Coonrod was of English descent 



[85] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

there seems scarcely room for doubt, and 
"Pile," or "Pyle" and "Pall MalP^ stand as 
mute testimony. And "York" too is a com- 
ponent part of old England. 

I was never able to learn why the village 
was given its unique name and there is no 
tradition that associates it with the noted 
street in London, though even to-day Pall 
Mall in Fentress county is but a single road. 
I asked a white-haired mountaineer how 
long the place had been known as Pall Mall. 
With a memory-reviving shake of his head 
that ended in a convinced nod, his answer 
was, "quite a-whit." 

And that is the nearest I ever came to 
accuracy. 

But seeing his reply did not contain the 
information wanted he looked at me 
thoughtfully and said: 

"Hit's jes' like ^Old Crow!' Every morn- 
ing for eighty-two years I ha' looked up at 

^86] 



A ''LONG HUNTER' 



the rocks o' that mountain 'en they h'aint 
changed a-bit." 

The government records show that Pall 
Mall was made a post-office on April 3, 
1832. 

Old Coonrod was a man of Big Business 
for his time; one of force of character who 
dominated his community and who "sized 
his man" by standards that were peculiarly 
his own. 

A man would come to him to buy a "poke" 
of corn or flour, or for a favor. To the sur- 
prize of the stranger the favor might be 
over-granted or the corn given without cost; 
or, upon the other hand, he would be 
bruskly dismissed without the least effort 
at explanation. Unknown to the stranger 
the condition of his "britches" had probably 
given him his credit rating with Old Coon- 
rod, for he held that patches upon the front 
of trousers, if the seat were whole, were 



1^7^ 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

decorations of honor, showing the man had 
torn them doing something, going forward. 
But, if the front of the trousers were good 
and the seat of them patched, no dealings 
of any nature were to be had with the dic- 
tator of the valley, for to Old Coonrod it 
meant the man "was like a rabbit; he could 
not stop without sitting down." 

But the residents of the valley, many of 
them Methodists, claim this estimate works 
a hardship upon members of their faith for 
a g^od Methodist could wear the knees out 
at prayer and the seat out in "backsliding." 

Old Coonrod's trading with the Indians 
was a series of successes. He is known to 
have had their confidence and friendship, 
and he was arbitrator between them and his 
neighbors whenever disputes arose. 

Fentress county lying on the western 
slope of the Cumberlands was part of the 
great hunting-grounds of the Shawnees, 

[88] 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



Cherokees, Creeks, Chickamaugas, Chicka- 
saws, and even the Iroquois of New York. 
The basin of the Ohio and Mississippi riv- 
ers, that part now Tennessee and Kentucky, 
wa« claimed by each of these tribes as its 
own, not as home but as a hunting-ground, 
and when bands of hunters of rival tribes 
met in the territory each fought the other 
as an invader, and their battles gave to Ken- 
tucky its Indian name, meaning in the 
Indian tongue the "Dark and Bloody 
Ground." 

But Old Coonrod kept pace with all of 
them and prospered from their friendship, 
and an Indian trail turned and led close to 
where he lived. The last of the Indians 
passed through the valley in 1842. 

As Old Coonrod prospered he bought land 
and slaves, and was a large owner of both in 
his day. He was a cautious and judicious 
purchaser of realty. The court records show 



[89] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

that at some time or other he was the owner 
of the most desirable parts of Fentress coun- 
ty. He held title to the land upon which 
Jamestown, the county seat, now stands, . 
which is the "Obedstown" of Mark Twain's 
"Gilded Age." He owned "Rock Castle," 
a tract of hardwood timber that is enclosed 
by mountains and can be reached by but one 
passageway, a place that became famous 
during the Civil War. He bought and sold 
much of the county's best farming-land 
along Yellow Creek. 

Fentress was made a county of Tennessee 
in 1823 and the first four pages of the new 
county's records of deeds show that within 
eighteen months Conrad Pile had added, 
through a number of trades, over six hun- 
dred acres to his already large holdings. 

So cautious in land titles was he that at 
the time of his death he owned three rights to 
his home-place including the farming-land 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



along Wolf River. The first was his squat- 
ter's rights, which he had homesteaded. But 
against this, North Carolina in ceding the 
territory of Tennessee to the United States 
Government reserved title to the land grants 
the state had offered to her soldiers of the 
Revolutionary War, and "one Henry Row- 
an" of North Carolina entered warrants 
given him on March 10, 1780. The Revo- 
lutionary soldiers had twenty years to locate 
their grants, and in 1797 Rowan appeared 
with surveyors, claiming by his entry of 1780 
the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." 
He operated under two land warrants of 320 
acres each, and in his registry of one of 
them he specified "a tract on the north side 
of Spring Creek (now Wolf River), to- 
gether with the improvements of Coonrod 
Pile." 

Old Coonrod traded with him, and Rowan 
took up his residence in what is now Overton 



C91] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

county. As late as 1817 there appeared "one 
Vincent Benham" with title under a con- 
flicting grant dated in 1793. Old Coonrod 
traded with him and with "$10 in hand'' 
Benham went his way. 

But the deeds which Coonrod recorded 
were voluminous, with corners as explicitly 
marked as any land title of to-day. Up on 
one of the mountainsides upon a rock there 
is a crudely carved "X" which was made by 
Coonrod to mark a corner which called for 
a "beech tree" that has disappeared, and 
this mark and the forks of Wolf River, 
corners in Coonrod's titles, stand to-day as 
survey points for the boundaries of the farms 
now in the valley. 

Coonrod built his home beside the spring, 
now known as "York Spring." Its yard in- 
cludes the spot where he made his first camp 
and where he killed his first deer. Char- 
acteristic of him, he built well. The house 

[92] 



A ''LONG HUNTER' 



was hewn logs, large logs, some of them over 
fifty feet in length. And the dwelling is now 
owned and occupied by one of his great 
grandchildren, William Brooks, the only 
brother of the mother of Sergeant York. 
The house is to-day one of the most substan- 
tial in the valley. Just across the spring 
branch and up the mountainside is the York 
home. 

Old Coonrod built one of the rooms with- 
out windows and with only one door. That 
door led into his own room and opened by 
his bedside. In this windowless room he 
kept his valuables and it was both a safe and 
a bank for him. Into a keg covered care- 
lessly with hides he tossed any gold coin 
that came to him in his trades. His rifle 
was kept there. He had the prongs of a 
pitchfork straightened and sharpened. The 
latter was his burglar insurance and he felt 
amply able to take care of his savings. And 



E93] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

in those days men frequently passed through 
the valley whose occupations were unknown 
and whose countenances were often evil to 
look upon. 

Pall Mall is not without its legend of the 
hidden keg of gold. It is known that Old 
Coonrod had his keg and kept in it his gold 
pieces. It is not known just when and why 
this method of saving was abandoned by 
him. But after his death no trace of the keg 
was found and it is said that upon his death- 
bed he tried to give his sons a message which 
was never completed, and it is believed he 
wished to reveal where his gold was hidden. 

There are some who say he was seen to 
go up a ravine with a mysterious bundle and 
to return without it. The ravine is pointed 
out. It opens on the roadway about half- 
way between the Rains' store and the old 
home of Coonrod. 

But there is no myth to the present-day 

194] 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



side of the story. More than squirrels and 
rabbits have been hunted up that ravine. 

But the legend of the hidden keg of gold 
is popular in many of the valleys of the 
Appalachians, and it will even be found to 
have leaped the valley of the Mississippi and 
almost identical in form appear and appeal 
to the impressionable imaginations of those 
who live in the Ozark Mountains to the west 
of that river. 

There was but one thing in which Old 
Coonrod stood really in fear, something not 
made or controlled by man. It was light- 
ning. Whenever a heavy thunder-storm 
broke over the mountains Coonrod, even in 
the last years of 'his life when he had grown 
so fat, ran with all the speed he could com- 
mand for the cave above the spring. Here 
he would stay, muttering and unapproach- 
able, until the storm abated. Then he would 
come from the cave swearing in that deep 



[95] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

voice that carried both power and terror, 
and, as the story goes, "for hours ^niggers' 
would be hopping all over the valley." 

Coonrod had a genuine admiration for the 
man or beast willing to fight for his rights. 
Once finding one of his jacks eating his 
growing corn, he put his dog upon him. 
The jack was old and small and shaggy. He 
turned upon the dog sent after him and seiz- 
ing the aggressor by the hair of his back 
lifted him from the ground and maintaining 
his dignity trotted out of the corn-field car- 
rying the squirming dog. That jack was 
pensioned. He was given his full supply of 
corn in winter and granted the freedom of 
the meadows and the mountainsides in sum- 
mer. Old Coonrod would never sell him. 

John M. Clemens, Mark Twain's father, 
lived in Jamestown when his "dwelling con- 
stituted one-fifteenth of Obedstown." He 

and Coonrod Pile were close friends, Pile 
— — 



A ''LOKG HUNTER'' 



helping elect Clemens to be the first Circuit 
Court Clerk of Fentress county. Both were 
firm believers in the future value of the tim- 
ber, coal, iron and copper to be found in the 
mountains. In the 30's both acquired all 
the acreage their resources would permit. 

Mark Twain makes "Squire Si Hawkins" 
of "The Gilded Age,"* conceded to be 
drawn from the life of his father, struggle 
to keep the value of the land unknown to the 
"natives." Squire Hawkins confides to his 
wife that the "black stuff that crops out on 
the bank of the branch" was — coal, and tells 
of his effort to keep a neighbor — from build- 
ing a chimney out of itl 

"Why it might have caught fire and told 
everything. I showed him it was too crum- 
bly. Then he was going to build it of cop- 

♦Copyright by Clara Gabrilowltsch and Susan Lee Warner. 
Harper & Bros., Publishers, N. Y. Permission is also granted 
by the Estate of Samuel L. Clemens and the Mark Twain Co. 



[97] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

per ore — splendid yellow forty per-cent ore. 
There's fortunes upon fortunes upon our 
land! It scared me to death. The idea of 
this fool starting a smelting furnace in his 
house without knowing it and getting his 
dull eyes opened. And then he was going 
to build it out of iron ore! There's moun- 
tains of iron here, Nancy, whole mountains 
of it. I wouldn't take any chance, I just 
stuck by him — I haunted him — I never let 
him alone until he built it of mud and sticks, 
like all the rest of the chimneys in this dis- 
mal country." 

Again ^'Squire Hawkins' " appreciation 
of the speculative value of his lands is shown 
in a talk with his wife: 

"The whole tract would not sell for even 
over a third of a cent an acre now, but some 
day people will be glad to get it for twenty 
dollars, fifty dollars, a hundred dollars an 
acre." (Here he dropped his voice to a 

[98] 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



whisper and looked anxiously around to see 
there were no eavesdroppers — '^a thousand 
dollars an acrel" 

To-day many of the acres owned by Coon- 
rod Pile and John M. Clemens have passed 
the hundred-dollar mark and are climbing 
toward that whispered and seemingly fabu- 
lous figure. And this, too, before the com- 
ing of the railroad for which ^^Squire Haw- 
kins" could not wait 

Twain delighted to have "Squire Haw- 
kins" sit upon "the pyramid of large blocks 
called the stile, in front of his home, contem- 
plating the morning." But John M. Clem- 
ens had his practical side, and the specifica- 
tions for the first jail for Fentress county, 
drawn by Clemens and in his own hand- 
writing made part of the county's records in 
1827, show a very substantial strain : 

"To wit, for a jail, a house of logs hewed 
a foot square, twelve feet in the clear, two 



[99] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

stories high, and this surrounded by another 
wall precisely of the same description, with 
a space between the two walls of about eight 
or ten inches, and that space filled complete- 
ly with skinned hickory poles, the ground 
floor to be formed of sills hewed about a 
foot square and laid closely .... the logs 
to extend through the inner wall of the 
building" — etc. 

And that jail was standing serviceable and 
strong until a few years ago when the pros- 
perity of Fentress county called for an edi- 
fice of red stone. 

Clemens and Pile remained friends and 
competitive land owners until "with an ac- 
tivity and a suddenness that bewildered 
Obedstown and almost took away its breath, 
the Hawkinses hurried through their ar- 
rangements in four short months and flitted 
out into the great mysterious blank that lay 
beyond the Knobs of Tennessee" — to Mis- 

[lOO] 



A "LONG HUNTER'' 



souri, where a few months afterward "Mark 
Twain" was born. 

Another friend of Coonrod Pile was 
David Crockett. The "Hero of the Alamo" 
had many hunts in Fentress county, upon 
the "Knobs" and along the upper waters 
of the Cumberland. The old Crockett home 
still stands a few miles to the north of James- 
town beside the road that leads to Pall Mall. 
It was in a house upon land owned by Coon- 
rod Pile that "Deaf and Dumb Jimmy 
Crockett" spent the last years of his life, and 
from which he made so many journeys to 
locate the silver mine of the Indians who 
had held him captive and who pinioned him 
to the ground while they dug their ore, 
never allowing him to see where they 
worked, but using him to help carry the 
mined product. David Crockett in his auto- 
biography tells the story of "Deaf and Dumb 
Jimmy" but he places the scene in Kentucky, 



[loi] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

making probably the same mistake in the 
location of the state-line boundary which 
Coonrod Pile had made. 

Coonrod Pile lived to the age of eighty- 
three and at the time of his death was the 
most powerful personality in Fentress coun- 
ty. His business interests had grown to such 
proportions that he had economic problems 
to solve and the simple practical methods he 
used are followed in the valley to-day. 

He dug only so much coal as he could 
use, the transportation problem preventing 
its sale. He could only market the poplar, 
the cedar and such woods as he could float 
on the rises of the Wolf to the Cumberland 
river to be rafted. He raised cotton, but 
only the amount the women needed for their 
looms. He grew wheat and corn, but no 
more than was necessary for flour and meal 
for the neighborhood and to feed the stock 
he owned, laying aside a portion for use in 

[102] 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



time of need for the improvident and un- 
fortunate. 

He was ready at any time to trade with 
anybody for almost anything. In the last 
score of the years of his life, the most suc- 
cessful financially, he found that the money 
he could accumulate came only from the sale 
of products that could move from the valley 
across the mountains by their own motive 
power — something that could go on foot. So 
he turned to stock-raising and with his own 
slaves cut the present roadway from Pall 
Mall to Jamestown, there to join with the 
old Kentucky Stock road which ran from 
Atlanta and Chattanooga, along the Cum- 
berland plateau by Jamestown on to the 
north through Frankfort and Cincinnati. 

Old Coonrod was not a one-price man on 
the realty he owned. If the purchase was 
for speculation he was a trader with his 
sights set high. If the buyer wanted a home, 



[103] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

he was generous. It meant the upbuilding 
of his community. So the people of that 
' day lived in comradeship. There were few 
luxuries and no real want. If there was "a 
farming patch" to be cleared, the neighbors 
came from miles around and there was a 
"log-rolling." If it was a home or a crib 
to be built, it was a "log-raising," and every- 
one worked and made fun from it. 

The steeple of a church arose in the val- 
ley. It was built by those of the Methodist 
faith. But before that and even afterward 
they held "camp-meetings" and "basket- 
meetings" where a community lunch was 
served under the trees and where the ser- 
vice lasted through the daylight hours, al- 
lowing for a mountain journey home. And 
the religious fervor was so sincere and in- 
tense at these meetings that they were called 
"melting sessions." 

Up the mountainside above the York 

[104] 



A ''LONG HUNTER'' 



spring, a space was cleared for shooting 
matches, where the prizes were beeves and 
turkeys, and where the men shot so accurate- 
ly that the slender crossing of two knife- 
blade marks was the bull's-eye of the target. 
And every one went on hunts, long hunts 
when crops were laid by or winter had 
checked farm work. And as human nature 
is the same the world over, there was many 
an upright resident of the ^^Valley of the 
Three Forks o' the Wolf" who left the 
plow standing in the furrow because the 
yelp and baying of the hounds grew warm 
upon the mountainside. 

The families of mountain men are usu- 
ally large in number, and the estate of Old 
Coonrod has passed through a long division. 
He had eight children, and his son Elijah 
Pile, the branch of the family to which Ser- 
geant York belongs, had eleven children. 
That portion of the estate which Elijah in- 



[105] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

herited passed into good hands. He con- 
served his part, handled well the talents left 
with him; but the second division by eleven, 
together with the ravages of the Civil War 
and the years that followed, left only seven- 
ty-five acres, and far from the best of it, to 
Mary York, the truly wonderful little moun- 
tain mother who gave to Alvin York those 
qualities of mind and heart which stood him 
in good stead in the Forest of Argonne, who 
taught him to so live that he feared no man, 
and to do thoroughly and always in the right 
way that which he had to do. "Else," as 
she so frequently said to him, "you'll have to 
do hit over, or hit'll cause you trouble." 



[io6] 



Ill 

THE PEOPLE 
OF THE 
MOUNTAINS 



I 




Ill 

The People of the Mountains 

HE log cabin of the pioneer influ- 
enced architecture and gave to us 
the house of Colonial design, the 
first distinctively American type, for the 
Colonial home grew around the pioneer's 
two rooms of logs separated by an open 
passageway. 

The muzzle-loading rifle — and it was the 
pioneer's gun — with its long barrel and its 
fine sights, gave confidence to the American 
soldier who carried it, for he trusted the 
weapon in his hands. 

Progressive inventions finally displaced 
this rifle in military use, but for the accuracy 
of the shot it has never been surpassed, and 
it is to-day a loved relic and a valued hunt- 
ing-piece. Men trained to shoot with it, 

[109] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

used to the slender line of its silver fore- 
sight and to the delicate response of its 
hair-trigger, have made rare records in 
marksmanship. The very difficulty of load- 
ing — the time it took — taught its users to 
be accurate and not spend the shot. 

This rifle stopped the British at Bunker 
Hill and Kings Mountain, and over its long 
barrel Alvin York and some of the best shots 
of the American army learned to bring 
their sights upward to the mark and tip the 
hair-trigger when the bead first reached its 
object. 

It was training acquired in the forest, the 
same manner of marksmanship, the same 
self-reliance and individual resourcefulness 
as a soldier that gave to Sergeant York the 
power to come back over the hill in Argonne 
Forest, bringing one hundred and thirty-two 
prisoners, and to the army under Andrew 
Jackson at New Orleans, more than a hun- 

[no] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

dred years before, the fighting resource to 
achieve victory with a loss of eight killed 
and thirteen wounded, while England's rec- 
ords show that '^about three thousand of the 
British were struck with rifle bullets." * 

The man trained behind the muzzle-load- 
ing rifle in all the wars America has fought 
has been individually a fighter and "a shot," 
formerly but little skilled in military train- 
ing, who while obeying orders fought along 
lines of personal initiative. In the earlier 
wars of the nation this soldier was known as 
a ''rifleman." It was with this class that 
General Jackson fought his campaigns 
against the Indians and the British, and at 
New Orleans ''the bone and sinew of his 
force were the riflemen of Tennessee and 
Kentucky." 

Against Jackson, England had sent the 

* From "The True Andrew Jackson," by Cyrus Townsend 
Brady, Chap. IV, p. 88 ; published by J. B. Lippincott Co., 1906. 

[Ill] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

flower of Wellington's army, distinguished 
for famous campaigns on the Spanish pen- 
insula against the marshals of Napoleon. 
Wellington said of these men in his "Mili- 
tary Memoirs": "It was an army that could 
go anywhere and do anything." 

Late in life when General Jackson had 
grown old, had twice been President, and 
was spending his declining days at the 
"Hermitage," his home near Nashville, as 
calmly and peacefully as it was possible for 
the fiery old warrior to live, he was shown 
this appreciation by Wellington. 

"Well," he said, "I never pretended I had 
an army that ^could go anywhere and do 
anything!' but at New Orleans I had a lot 
of fellows that could fight more ways and 
kill more times than any other fellows on 
the face of the earth." 

Returning from the Indian wars and from 
the War of 1812, the mountaineers and 

[112] 




SERGT. YORK AT THE TOMB OF PRESIDENT JACKSON 

"The bone and sinew of the army of General Jackson, in his Indian 
campaigns and against the British at New Orleans, were the riflemen 
of Tennessee and Kentucky." 



I 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

backwoodsmen, who were then rapidly set- 
tling up the valley of the Mississippi, hung 
their rifles over their open fireplaces, or be- 
tween the rafters of their cabin homes and 
turned to the enjoyment of the peace they 
had won. 

In the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the 
Wolf" Old Coonrod Pile was still the domi- 
nant figure. 

Those who had settled in the valley were 
prospering on its fertile soil. It was then, 
as it is to-day, remote from popular high- 
ways, but the valley had grown into a com- 
munity almost self-supporting. The owners 
of the land had equipped their farms with 
such agricultural tools as were in use in 
those days, and the Wolf river had been 
dammed and a water-driven flour mill 
erected. 

The houses tho built of logs and 
chinked with clay were comfortable homes, 

[113] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

where in winter wood-fires roared in wide 
chimney-places, where there was no prob- 
lem of the high cost of living — and few 
problems of any kind relating to living. 

The men of the valley farmed diversified 
crops, furnishing all that was needed for 
food and clothing, and they even raised to- 
bacco for the pipes smoked at the general 
store run by Coonrod Pile in an end room 
of his home. 

It was the day when the weaving-loom 
was the piano in the home, and all the wo- 
men carded, spun and wove. The table- 
garden, the care of the house, the prepara- 
tion of the meals and the making of the 
covering and the clothes were in the women's 
division of the labor. The families usually 
were large and every member a producer. 
To the girls fell shares of the mother's work. 
The boys helped in the fields, chopped the 
wood and rounded up the stock, that at 

[114] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

times wandered far into the mountains. 
There were bells on the cows, on the sheep 
and even the hogs, and the boys soon learned 
to distinguish ownerships by the delicate dif- 
ferences in the browsing "tong'' in the tone 
of the bells. 

Residents of the valley sold to the outside 
world the live stock they raised, and poultry 
and feathers and furs, and tar and resin from 
the pines on the mountaintops. They pur- 
chased tea, coffee and sugar, a few house- 
hold and farm conveniences, and little else. 
The balance of the trade was heavily in 
their favor and they were prosperous and 
happy. 

They had no labor problems. They rec- 
ognized without collective bargaining the 
eight-hour shift — "eight hours agin dinner 
and eight hours after hit; ef hit don't rain;" 
as one old mountaineer, living there to-day, 
interpreted the phrase, " A day's work." 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

Even when the home of the mountaineer 
was a one- or two-room cabin, accommoda- 
tions for any stranger could be provided, 
and if he wished to remain, work could be 
found for him. They observed without 
thought of inconvenience the Colonial idea 
of ^'bundling." 

When the stranger proved worthy there 
would be a log-rolling and a space of ground 
cleared for him to till, and a log-raising in 
which the community joined, and made a 
merry occasion of it, to give him a home. 
The way was easy for his ownership of the 
land and the cabin. Prices for cleared land, 
around the middle of the last century, ranged 
from twenty-five cents to five dollars an acre. 

In the valley the father never talked to 
the son of the dignity of labor. Much was to 
be done and every one labored and thought 
of it as but the proper use of the sunlight of 
a day. 

[ii6] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

Their life was primitive, rugged, but con- 
tented. Deer and bears were in the moun- 
tains, and wild turkeys were to be found in 
large flocks, while the cry of wolves added 
zest to the whine of a winter wind. 

A cook-stove was an unknown luxury, and 
the women prepared their meals in the open 
fireplace. The men cut their small grain 
with a reap-hook and threshed it beneath 
the hoofs of horses. 

The mode of life made men of strong con- 
victions and deep feelings. But those feel- 
ings were seldom expressed except under 
the influence of religious devotions. 

The ministers were all circuit riders and 
venerated leaders of the people of the moun- 
tainsides. They traveled the mountains on 
horseback, constantly exposed to hardships, 
and they labored devoutly without consider- 
ation of the personal cost. It was the cus- 
tom for these itinerant ministers to give 

[117] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

free rein to their horses and read as they 
rode the mountain-paths, stopping for a 
prayer at every home they reached. Pro- 
tracted meetings were held in almost every 
community they visited, for many months 
would pass before they returned. Funeral 
services would be held for all who had 
died during the absence of the minister. The 
meetings lasted so long as there was hope of 
a single conversion. 

One of the preachers of those old days, 
who was born in the "Valley of the Three 
Forks o' the Wolf" and preached at Pall 
Mall as part of his circuit when ordained, 
has left a record of one year's work: 

"During the conference year I preached 
152 times, traveled 1,918 miles on horseback, 
prayed with 424 families, witnessed 80 con- 
versions to God, and received 67 persons 
into the church. I sold about $40 worth 

of books, baptized 40 adults and 18 infants 
__ 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

. . . and received less than $30 of salary 
for same, and raised for benevolence $36.25. 
To God be all the glory! I have toiled and 
endured as seeing Him who is invisible. 
However, when God has poured from 
clouds of mercy rich salvation upon the 
people, and when in religious enjoyment, 
from the most excellent glory, I have been 
lifted to Pisgah's top, and have seen by faith 
the goodly land before me, I would not ex- 
change this work for a city station." 

Against the worldliness of some of his 
people, the same old mountain minister re- 
corded a protest: 

^^I have known families who had three or 
four hundred dollars loaned out on interest, 
and not less than five hundred dollars' worth 
of fat cattle on the range, who did not own 
a Bible, or take any religious newspaper, 
nor any other kind, and did not have any 
books in their homes, and yet owned two or 

[119] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

three fiddles and three or four rifie-guns." 

The day of prosperity and religious con- 
tentment at Pall Mall lasted until the com- 
ing of the Civil War. 

Fentress county had contributed its pro 
rata of volunteers to the conflict with Mexi- 
co, and Uriah York, the grandfather of Ser- 
geant York, was among those who stormed 
the heights at Chapultepec. 

Tho this war was declared by a Presi- 
dent who came from Tennessee, the Mexi- 
can conflict did not reach to the firesides and 
into the hearts of the people of the moun- 
tains of the state as other wars had done. So 
years passed in which there was no outward 
evidence of the war spirit of Fentress county 
that was soon to tear families asunder, leave 
farms untenanted and to obliterate grave- 
yards under the rush of horses' hoofs. 

The Yorks had come to Fentress county 
from North Carolina and settled on Indian 

[ 120] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

Creek. Uriah York was the son of John 
York, and they came from Buncombe coun- 
ty in that ^'Old North State," the county 
which had a reputation like Nazareth so 
far as turning out any good thing was con- 
cerned, and the path of the cant, derisive 
phrase, "All bunkum," leads directly back 
to the affairs of that good old county. 

On Indian Creek the Yorks were farmers, 
but at his home Uriah started one of the few 
schools then in Fentress county. Flis school 
began after crops were laid by and ran for 
three months. He used but two text books — 
the "blue-backed speller" and the Bible. 

There are men living to-day on Indian 
Creek who went to school under Uriah York, 
and they recall the uniqueness of his disci- 
pline as well as his school curriculum. The 
hickory rod was the enforcer of school rules, 
but full opportunity to contemplate the deli- 
cate distinction betvs'^een right and wrong 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

was given to all. A three-inch circle was 
drawn upon the schoolroom wall and the 
offending pupil was compelled to hold his 
nose within the penal mark until penitent. 
Young and active he took part in all the 
school sports in the long recess periods, for 
his school lasted all day. Learning at the 
end of one school term that the pupils had 
planned as part of the simple commence- 
ment exercises to duck him in Indian Creek, 
he exposed their plot, playfully defied them, 
left the schoolroom with a bound through 
an open window and led them on a chase 
through the mountains. He circled in his 
course so he could lead the run back to the 
schoolhouse. As evidence of goodfellow- 
ship and as an example of the spirit of gen- 
erosity in the celebration of victory, he gave 
to each of the boys as they came in, a drink 
of whisky, from a clay demijohn he had 
concealed in the schoolroom. 

[122] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

But in those days whisky and apple 
brandy were considered a necessary part of 
household supplies, and there was but little 
drunkenness. Whisky and brandy were 
medicine, used as first aid, regardless of the 
ailment, while awaiting the arrival of the 
doctor with his saddlebags of pills and pow- 
ders. Their social value, too, was recog- 
nized, and the gourd and demijohn ap- 
peared almost simultaneously with the 
arrival of any guest. But it was bad form — 
evidence of a weak will — for anyone, save 
the old men, to show the influence of what 
they drank. This was, however, a perquisite 
and one of the tolerated pleasures of old age. 

In the records of a lawsuit tried in Fen- 
tress county in 1841 the price-list of some 
necessaries and luxuries are shown: 

"To two gallons of liquor, $1 ; one quart 
of whisky and six pounds of pork, 80 cents ; 
one deer-skin, 75 cents; two kegs of tar, $2; 

[123] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

two ounces of indigo, 40 cents; one gallon 
of whisky, SO cents ; five and one-half pints 
of apply brandy, 31j4 cents." 

They were almost uneventful years at 
Pall Mall from the days of Coonrod Pile 
until the Civil War. Less than a score of 
years lapsed from the death of the pioneer in 
1849 until over the mountains broke the war- 
storm in a fury that has no parallel except 
in wars where father has fought son, and 
brother fought brother; where the cause of 
war and the principles for which it is fought 
are lost in the presence of cruelties created 
in personal hatred and deeds of treachery 
perpetrated for revenge. A third genera- 
tion had grown to manhood at Pall Mall. 

In Fentress county, the polling of the vote 
upon secession was marked with bloodshed. 
The county was on the military border be- 
tween the free and the slaveholding states. 
Coonrod Pile had been a slaveholder, but 

[124] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

few of the mountaineers were owners. Slav- 
ery as an institution did not appeal to their 
Anglo-Saxon principles; poverty had pre- 
vented slavery's advance into the mountains 
as a custom, and as racial distinction was 
not to be clearly defined into master and 
worker, the negro's presence in the moun- 
tains was unwelcomed. A war to uphold a 
custom they did not practise did not appeal 
to them ; so as a great wedge the Alleghany 
mountains, extending far into the slave- 
holding states, was peopled with Union sym- 
pathizers. 

Fentress county on the slope of the great 
mountain range and on the border between 
the territory firmly held by the North and 
by the South became a no-man's land, sub- 
jected successively to marauding bands from 
each side, a land for plunder and revenge. 

Before the war the county had been sharp- 
ly divided politically, and with few excep- 

[125] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

tions that alignment held. Those who were 
Union sympathizers went north into Ken- 
tucky and joined the Federal forces, and 
those on the side of the South went for en- 
listment in the armies of the Confederacy. 
The men who remained at home were com- 
pelled by public sentiment to take sides, and 
the bitterest of feeling was engendered. The 
raids of passing soldiers was the excuse for 
the organization, by both sides, of bands who . 
claimed they were "Home Guards" — the 
Federals under "Tinker" Beaty, and the 
Confederates under Champ Ferguson. 
These bands, each striving for the mastery, 
soon developed into guerrillas of the worst 
type the war produced, and anarchy pre- 
vailed. 

Churches were closed, for religious ser- 
vices were invaded that the bushwackers 
could get the men they sought. Homes were 
burned. Civil courts suspended. Post- 

[126] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

offices and post-roads were abandoned. No 
stores were kept open and the merchandise 
they formerly held was concealed, and 
there became a great scarcity of the neces- 
saries of life. Many homes were deserted 
by entire families and their land turned out 
as common ground. There was waste and 
ruin on every hand, and no man's life was 
safe. 

Each deed of cruelty was met with an act 
of revenge, until men were killed in retalia- 
tion, the only charge brought against them 
being, "a Northern sympathizer," or "a 
Southern sympathizer.'' There is not a road 
in the county not marked with the blood of 
some soldier or non-combatant. 

No section of the great Civil War suffered 
so enduringly as that which was the bound- 
ary line between the sections, and no part 
of the boundary suffered more from devas- 
tations of war in the passing to and fro of 

[ 127] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

armed forces and from the raids of maraud- 
ing bands, steel-heartened in quest of re- 
venge, than did Fentress county. 

At the outbreak of the war, Uriah York 
went north into Kentucky and joined the 
Federal forces. Ill, he had returned to the 
home of his wife's father at Jamestown, and 
while in bed learned of the approach of a 
band of Confederates. He arose and fled 
for safety to a refuge-shack his father-in- 
law had built in the forest of ^'Rock Castle.'* 
His flight was made in a storm that was half 
rain and half sleet, and from the exposure 
he died in the lonely hut three days after- 
ward. Only forty years of age, he had 
served his country in two wars. 

The "Valley of the Three Forks o' the 
Wolf" paid its tribute of blood and money, 
Elijah Pile had grown old and years before 
had succeeded his father, Coonrod Pile, as 
head of the family. All his sons had grown 

[128] 






•■'"'^- .. 










'The very difficulty of loading the cap-and-ball rifle, the time jt took, 
taught its users to be accurate and not spend the shot." 
[The man kneeling, priming the rifle, is Alvin Terry. See page 199.] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

to manhood. He was a non-combatant, but 
a Union sympathizer. His four sons were 
divided in their allegiance — two upon each 
side. And two of them paid the supreme 
price, and they paid for their convictions 
as they rode along public highways. 

Conrad Pile, Jr., ^'Rod" as he was known, 
like his father, Elijah Pile, was a non-com- 
batant, but sympathized with the North. In 
the autumn of 1863 for some cause, unknown 
to his relatives, he was taken prisoner by 
Confederate troops, members of Champ 
Ferguson's band. As they rode along the 
road with him, some shots were fired. They 
left him there. 

In June of the following year, Jeff Pile, 
a brother of "Rod," was riding along the 
road beyond the mill that creaks in the wa- 
ters of Wolf River. He was going to visit 
a brother. He had taken no active part in 
the war, but was a Southern sympathizer. 

[ 129] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

Some of ^^Tinker" Beaty's men galloped into 
sight, fired, galloped on. Mountain men fire 
but once. 

But the murder of Jeff Pile threw a red 
shadow across the years that were to come 
after the war was ended. 

The war-feuds of Fentress county did not 
end with the ending of the war. There was 
lawlessness for years. Some of the Union 
men and Union sympathizers, in the major- 
ity in the county during hostilities, assumed 
to the full the new power that came to 
them by the war's outcome. Conservative 
civic leaders sought to reestablish a condi- 
tion of peace, but the lawless and desperate 
element prepared personally to profit from 
the situation. 

Farms had been deserted and many of 
the owners of these lands who had fought on 
the side of the Confederacy were kept away 
through the threats of death should they re- 

[130] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

turn, and some who had remained through- 
out the war were forced to flee to protect 
their lives from those who coveted their 
property. 

A series of land-frauds sprang up under 
the cloak of the law. Upon vacant farms 
false debts were levied; fake administrators 
took charge of lands whose owners had died 
during the conflict; other property was has- 
tily forced under sale for taxes. 

That the proceedings should appear legal, 
the foreclosures were by due process of law. 
But if quietly circulated warnings against 
a general bidding for property when offered 
at court sale were not effective, some well- 
known desperate character would appear at 
the sale and threaten anyone who dared bid 
against him. 

The bitterness of the feeling of the two 
sides subsided slowly, but there was ever 
present the realization that old alinements 

r^30 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

could be quickly and bloodily revived. 
Champ Ferguson, sought by the Federal 
authorities, appeared suddenly upon the 
streets of Jamestown. That day his old rival, 
"Tinker," was there. It was a personal 
battle the two leaders fought, while James- 
town looked on silently, fearful of the out- 
come. Beaty received three wounds, but 
escaped on horseback. 

A short time afterward Ferguson was 
hanged at Nashville by order of court mar- 
tial. The charge against him was that he 
had entered the hospital at Emery and 
Henry College and shot to death a wounded 
Federal lieutenant. Ferguson claimed justi- 
fication as the Federal lieutenant, under or- 
ders to escort a war-prisoner — a Confeder- 
ate officer and personal friend of Ferguson's 
— to headquarters, had, instead, stood his 
prisoner against a tree by a roadside and 
ordered a firing-squad to kill him. And the 

[132] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

court-martial indictment of Ferguson read 
— "and for other crimes." 

One of "Tinker" Beaty's men was Pres 
Huff, who lived in the "Valley of the Three 
Forks o' the Wolf." It was generally be- 
lieved that he was the leader of the band 
who had ridden out of the woods and killed 
Jeff Pile, as he traveled unarmed along the 
Byrdstown road. 

Huff's father had been shot. The scene 
of his death was where the branch from the 
York Spring crosses the public road at the 
Pile home. The deed was done by a band 
of Confederates who had taken the elder 
Huff prisoner, and neither Jeff Pile, nor his 
brothers, were to be connected with it, ex- 
cept in the quickly prejudiced mind of the 
victim^s son. 

The desperate character of Pres Huff is 
evidenced by the records of the United 
States Circuit Court for the Middle District 

[133] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

of Tennessee in the suit of the McGinnis 
heirs for land in Fentress county. Their 
bill recites : 

"Armed men who were led and controlled 
by one Preston Huff, who was a brigand of 
the most desperate character, forced com- 
plainants' father and themselves to leave the 
county to secure their lives and kept them 
from the county by threats of most brutal 
violence. The history of these men and the 
times prove clearly that these threats were 
not idle, nor those who opposed them sur- 
vived their vengeance." 

At the foreclosure on the McGinnis prop- 
erty, Pres Huff rode his horse between the 
court officers and those attending the sale, 
and pistol in hand declared the land his by 
right of possession. The bill continues as 
follows : 

"Preston Huff, who was the desperado 
heretofore referred to, publicly proclaimed 

[134] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

that he had fought for the land, had run the 
McGinnises from the county, and if anyone 
bid for the land against him he would kill 
him on sight. Even his co-conspirators 
would not brook his displeasure. The land 
was sold on his bid, no one dared oppose 
him. The history of his career shows it 
was wisdom to shun him. Many have been 
killed by him in the most cold and brutal 
manner." 

There came to Pall Mall, when General 
Burnside was moving his Federal forces 
southward, a young man by the name of 
William Brooks. He had joined the Union 
Army-at his home in Michigan. He was a 
daring horseman, handsome, fair and his 
hair was red — a rich copperesque red. The 
army moved on, but young Brooks remained 
in the valley. He claimed that as a private 
soldier he had done more than his share 
in the conquest of the South — and that the 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

conquest that should ever go to his credit 
was the conquest of Nancy Pile. 

When they were married, his father-in- 
law, Elijah Pile, gave him a farm and he 
tilled it, and he smiled his way into the favor 
of the community. 

He lived in the valley about two years, and 
a baby had been born to them. The feeling 
between the children of Elijah Pile and Pres 
Huff was silent but tense; over it there fell 
constantly the shadow of the murder of Jeff 
Pile. . 

Meeting down at the old mill one day, 
Pres Huff and "Willie" Brooks engaged in 
an excited argument. Between the dark- 
browed, sullen mountaineer and the slender, 
gay young man a contest seemed uneven, and 
was prevented. Huff told Brooks that fhe 
next time they met he would kill him. 

They met next day, on the mountainside, 
on the road that leads by the Brooks home, 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

on across the spring-branch, up beside the 
York home and then up the mountain. 
Huffs riderless horse galloped on and 
stopped in front of a mountain cabin; his 
body lay dead in the road. 

There was a hurried consultation at the 
home of Elijah Pile. Huffs friends, it was 
realized, would not be long in coming. 
Young Brooks went out of the house, down 
by the spring, and up the mountain back of 
it. He was never seen in the valley again. 

Huffs friends waited. 

Weeks afterward, Nancy Brooks, carry- 
ing her baby, went to visit a friend. She 
evaded the watchfulness, of her husband's 
enemies, succeeded in crossing the Kentucky 
line and disappeared in the mountains to the 
north of it. 

The friends of Pres Huff knew she would 
write home. Months elapsed, but finally a 
letter came, and was i-ntercepted. She and 

[137] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

her husband were at a logging-camp in the 
northern woods of Michigan. 

Secretly, extradition papers for Brooks 
were secured, and Huffs former partner in 
a mercantile business, fully equipped with 
warrants, appeared with a sheriff before the 
door of the cabin in the Michigan woodSi 
Brooks was brought back to Jamestown, and 
put into the log-ribbed jail that John M. 
Clemens, "Mark Twain's" father, had built. 

But there was no trial by law. The next 
night, through the moonlight and the pines, 
a little body of men rode. Up the valley, 
across the plateau, they went, and James- 
town was sleeping. 

Taking Brooks from the jail they carried 
him three miles down the road toward Pall 
Mall. Here they bound a rope around his 
feet, unbridled a horse and tied the other 
end of the rope to the horse's tail. They 
taunted Brooks. But they could not make 

[138] 



THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS 

him break his silence, until he asked to be 
allowed to see his wife and baby. Rough 
men laughed, and there was the report of a 
gun. The horse, frightened, galloped down 
the road, and bullets were fired into the 
squirming body as it was dragged over the 
rocks. 

The war had steeled men for the coming 
of death and crime, but at the manner of the 
death of 'Willie" Brooks a shudder passed 
over the mountainsides. To Nancy Brooks 
was born a son a short time afterward, and 
he was named after his father. 

A silent, broken-hearted woman, Nancy 
Brooks took up again her life at her father's 
home. To the little girl she had carried on 
her flight to Michigan and to the boy whose 
hair had the copper-red of the father, she 
devoted herself. The girl had been named 
Mary, and she inherited the piquancy and 
wit that had made her mother the belle of 

[139] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

the valley, and as she grew to womanhood 
the mountaineers saw again the Nancy 
Brooks they had loved before war had come 
with its cold blighting fingers of death. 

At the age of fifteen Mary Brooks met 
William York, the son of Uriah York, and 
they were married. A home was built for 
them, beyond the branch, beside the spring. 
And Alvin York was their third son. 



[140] 



IV 

THE 

MOLDING 
OF A MAN 




IV 

The Molding of a Man 

|HE first year after the marriage 
of William York and Mary 
Brooks, they lived at the Old 
Coonrod Pile home, and William York 
worked as a ''cropper." Securing the farm 
that had been given the bride, they modeled 
into a one-room home the corn-crib of Elijah 
Pile, that stood across the spring-branch and 
up the mountainside. It was a log crib, and 
they chinked it with clay, and using split 
logs from the walls of the old shed, a pun- 
cheon floor was made. The coming of 
spring brought the blossoms of flowers the 
girl-wife had planted. 

Honeysuckle and roses have bloomed 
around that cabin each succeeding summer, 
and it proved the foundation of a home that 

[143] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

was to withstand the troubles of poverty in 
many winters. It was a home so rare and 
real that it pulled back to the mountains a 
son who had gone out into the world and 
won fame and the offers of fortunes for the 
deeds he had done as a soldier. 

William York, in his simple philosophy 
of life, disciplined himself, and later his 
boys, to the theory that contentment was to 
be found in the square deal and honest labor. 
He was so fair and just in all relations with 
his neighbors that the people of the valley 
called him "Judge" York; and his honesty 
was so rugged and impartial that not infre- 
quently was he left as sole arbiter even when 
his own interests were involved. In talks by 
the roadside, at the gate of his humble home, 
seated on the rocks that surround the spring, 
many a neighborhood dispute has been set- 
tled that prejudice could have fanned into 
a lawsuit. 

[144] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

Yet William York never prospered, as 
prosperity is measured by the accumulation 
of property, and it has been said of him that 
he ''just about succeeded in making a hard 
living." 

He was farmer, blacksmith, hunter — a 
man of the mountains who found pleasure 
in his skill with his rifle. But the memories 
of him that linger in the valley, or those that 
are revived at the mention of his name, are 
of him in the role of husband, father and 
friend. 

The Civil War had scattered much of the 
wealth that Old Coonrod Pile had accumu- 
lated and Elijah Pile had conserved. The 
number of heirs brought long division to the 
realty and most of those who had benefited 
by the inheritance were all left ''land poor." 

To Nancy Brooks, as her part, came the 
home the old "Long Hunter" had built with 
such thoroughness and care, together with 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

seventy-five acres of land. This she left to 
her boy v^ho had been named after his ill- 
fated father — and he lives there to-day. To 
Mrs. York had been given seventy-five acres, 
^'part level and part hilly," that was the 
share of her aunt, Polly Pile. 

In the cave above the spring, which was 
Coonrod Pile's first home, William York 
built a blacksmith's shop, where he mended 
log-wagons and did the work in wood and 
metal the neighborhood required. He 
farmed, and worked in the shop — but in his 
heart, always, was the call of the forests 
that surrounded him, and it was his one 
great weakness. A blast from his horn 
vvould bring his hounds yelping around him ; 
and often, unexpectedly, he would go on a 
hunt that at times stretched into weeks of 
absence. 

His hounds were the master pack of those 
hills. On his hunts when he built his camp- 

[146] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

fire at night he gathered the dogs around 
him and singled out for especial favors those 
whose achievements had merited distinction 
during the day. Following a custom that in 
those days prevailed among owners of hunt- 
ing-hounds, the dog that proved himself 
the leader of the pack while on a hunt was 
decorated with a ribbon or some emblem 
upon the collar. Small game was abundant 
in the mountains that made the "Valley of 
the Three Forks o' the Wolf," but the deer 
and bear had withdrawn to the less fre- 
quented hills. The hunts were for sport; 
there was no real recompense in the value 
of the pelts. 

Alvin was born in the one-room cabin on 
December 13, 1887. There were two older 
children — Henry and Joe. Alvin's early 
life was different in no way from that of 
other children of the mountains. He lived in 
touch with nature, and without ever know- 

[147] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

ing when or how the information came to 
him, he could call the birds by their names 
and knew the nests and eggs of each of them, 
knew the trees by their leaves and their bark, 
and was familiar with the haunts of the rab- 
bit and the squirrel, the land- and the water- 
turtle. While still too small for the rough 
run of the mountains, he has stood, red-eyed, 
by the gate of his home and watched his 
father and the hounds go off to the hunt. 
And as he grew, his hair took on that color 
that trace of him while at play could be lost 
in the red-brush that grew upon the moun- 
tainside. 

There was one part of the routine of the 
week at Pall Mall that has interested Alvin 
York from early boyhood. It was the shoot- 
ing-matches, held on Saturday, on the moun- 
tainside, above the spring, just where a 
swell of the slope made a "table-land," and 
where a space had been cleared for these 

[148] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

tests of skill. The clearing was long and 
slender, such a glade through the trees as 
the alley of the mountain bowlers which Rip 
Van Winkle found in the Catskills — only 
the shooting-range was longer. A hundred 
and fifty yards were needed for one of the 
contests. 

This aisle had been cut through a forest 
of gray beech and brown oaks. At the 
points where the targets were to be set the 
clearing widened so that the sunlight, filter- 
ing through the leaves and flickering upon 
the slender carpet of green, could fall full 
and clear. 

Each Saturday the mountaineers were 
there — and William York and Alvin were 
among the "regulars." Often there were 
fifty or more men, and they came bringing 
their long rifles, horns of powder, pouches 
made of skin in which were lead and bullet 
molds, cups of caps, cotton gun-wadding; 

[ 149] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

carrying turkeys, driving beeves and sheep, 
which v^ere to be the prizes. And when the 
prizes gave out, some of the men remained 
and shot for money — "pony purses," they 
were called. 

The turkey-shoots were over two ranges — 
one forty yards and one a hundred and fifty 
^ yards. At the latter range the turkey was 
tied to a stake driven in the center of the 
opening at the further end of the glade. A 
cord, about two feet in length, was fastened 
to the stake and to one leg of the gobbling, 
moving target. It was ten cents a shot, tossed 
to the man who offered the prize. 

Often the bird fell at the first trial, and a 
hit was any strike above the turkey's knee. 
But the long-distance turkey-shoots were the 
opening events, and the marksman had his 
gun to warm up, his eye to test and his shoot- 
ing nerve to be brought to calmness. So 
frequently it would happen that the entrance 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

money ran into a sum that gave a prize value 
to the turkey, as prices ran for turkeys in 
those days. There was the element of chance 
for the man offering the prize that was al- 
ways alluring. 

The second turkey-shoot was held at the 
forty-yard range. But the bird was now 
tethered behind a log, so that only his head 
and red wattles could appear. Here, too, 
the turkey was given freedom of motion and 
granted self-determination as to how he 
should turn his head in wonder at the as- 
semblage of men before him ; or, if he should 
elect, he could disappear entirely behind the 
log if he found something that interested 
him upon the ground nearby, and the marks- 
man must wait for the untimed appearance 
of the bobbing head. It took prompt action 
and a quick bead to score a hit. 

And it was years afterward, after Alvin 
York had become the most expert rifle-shot 

[151] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

that those mountains had ever held, that He 
sat in the brush on the slope of a hill in the 
Forest of Argonne and watched for German 
helmets and German heads to bob above 
their pits and around trees — just forty yards 
away. 

The event in which centered the interest 
of all gathered at those Saturday matches, 
was the shooting for the beef. 

Each man prepared his own target — a 
small board, which was charred over a fire 
built of twigs and leaves. On this black sur- 
face was tacked a piece of white paper, about 
two by three inches in size, and in the cen- 
ter of the boitom margin of the white paper 
was cut a noi i — an inverted "V," not over 
a half-inch in height. This permitted the 
marksman to rrise the silver foresight of his 
rifle over a black, charred surface until the 
hairline of the sight fit into the tip of the 
triangle cut into white paper. It was a pin- 

[152] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

point target that left to the ability of the 
marksman the exactness of his bead. 

The tip of the triangle in the paper was 
not the buirs-eye. It was simply the most 
delicate point that could be devised upon 
which to draw a bead. 

The bull's-eye was a point at which two 
knife-blade marks crossed. When the tar- 
get was in position this delicately marked 
bull's-eye could not be seen by the shooter. 

With practice shots they established how 
the gun was carrying and the direction in 
which the nerves of the marksman's eye were 
at the time deflecting the ball. Finally the 
marksman drew his bead on the tip of the 
triangle and where the shot punctured the 
white paper the bull's-eye would be located. 

This was done by moving the white paper 
until the knife-blade cross showed through 
the center of the hole the bullet had made in 
it. The paper in this position was retacked 

[153 ] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

upon the board, and underneath was slipped 
a second piece of paper making the paper 
target appear as if no hole had been torn 
through it. The bulPs-eye so located was 
usually within a half-inch radius of the tri- 
angle tip. 

So exact was the marksmanship of these 
men that they recognized that neither gun 
nor man shot the same, day after day. They 
knew a man's physical condition changed 
as these contests progressed, and that the gun 
varied in its register when it was hot and 
when cool. 

The range for the beef-shoot was forty 
yards "ef ye shot from a chunk." Twenty- 
seven yards, or about two-thirds the distance, 
if the shot was offhand. ^'A chunk" was any 
rest for the rifle — a bowed limb cut from a 
tree, the fork of a limb driven firmly into 
the ground, a part of a log — anything that 
was the height to give the needed low level 

[154] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

to the rifle-barrel when the shooter lay 
sprawled behind the gun. The permission 
to shoot from the rest was a concession to 
poorer marksmanship. Shooting offhand 
required nerve, and steadiness of nerve, to 
"put it there, and hold it." 

The science of marksmanship they learned 
through experience. The rifle-ball, forced 
down through the muzzle, was firmly 
packed and the cap carefully primed to pre- 
vent a "long fire." In taking aim in the off- 
hand shots the gun's barrel was brought up- 
ward so the target was always in full view, 
and as the bead was drawn the body was 
tilted backward until an easy balance for the 
long barrel was found. The elbow of the 
arm against which the butt of the rifle rested 
was lifted high, awkwardly high, but this 
position prevented any nervous backward 
jerk or muscular movement of the arm that 
might sway the barrel. Only the weight of 

[155} 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

the forefinger was needed to spring the hair- 
trigger. When the gun-sights were nearing 
the tip of the black triangle, the marksman 
ceased breathing until the shot was fired. 

So accurate were they, that when the bul- 
let tore out the point where the two knife- 
blade marks crossed, it was simply consid- 
ered a good shot. It was called "cutting 
center." But to decide the winning shot 
from among those who cut center it was 
necessary to ascertain how much of the ball 
lay across center. . 

Each contestant who claimed a chance to 
win brought his board to the judges for 
award. For each one of them a bullet was 
cut in half, and the half, with the flat side 
up, was forced into the bullet hole in the 
target until level with the board's surface. 
With a compass the exact center of the 
face of the half bullet was marked — a dent, 
as if made by a pin-point. Then across the 

[156] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

surface of the bright, newly-cut lead, the 
knife-blade marks of the original bull's-eye, 
partly torn away by the shot, were retraced. 
The distance between the pin-dent center 
and the point where the knife-marks crossed 
could then be exactly measured. 

When the cross passed directly over the 
dented center, the shot was perfect and the 
mountaineers called it "laying the seam of 
the ball on center." 

In the beef-shoots it was a dollar a shot. 
Each man could purchase any number of 
shots. When the pot contained the number 
of dollars asked for the beef the contest 
began. The prize was divided into five 
parts. The two best shots got, each, a hind- 
quarter of the beef. The third and fourth, 
the f orequarters ; the fifth of the winners, the 
hide and tallow. The beef was slain at the 
scene of the shoot, each winner carrying 
home his part. 

[157] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

William York has been known to carry 
the prize home on hoof — having made the 
five best shots. But this was unusual, for 
all the mountaineers grew up with a rifle in 
their hands and they knew how to use it. 

At the shooting-matches it was again 
"Judge" York. He always handled the 
compass in making the awards. To the 
shooting-matches, still held at Pall Mall, 
Sam York, Alvin's brother, brings the com- 
pass and the rifle which his father had used. 

The contest for the sheep was under the 
same conditions that surrounded the beef- 
matches; only the entrance fee was smaller. 
Usually it was six shots for a dollar. This 
odd division of the dollar, made to fit their 
term, "a shilling a shot," shows the people 
of the valley clinging to their English 
customs and still influenced by the Colonial 
period in America. In Colonial days in 
many parts of the country the shilling's 

[158] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

value was placed at sixteen and two-thirds 
cents. 

Contests for the "pony purses" were con- 
solation-shoots for those who had made no 
winning, and to gratify that element who 
for the love of the sport would keep the 
matches going until in the day's dimming 
light the sights of the gun could not be used. 

One day at one of these shooting-matches 
at Pall Mall I witnessed a demonstration of 
the imperturbability of these mountain men. 
One of the contestants had cut center and 
about a third of the ball lay across it, when 
Ike Hatfield, a cousin of Alvin's, took "his 
place at the line." 

He was young, over six feet in height, 
slender and erect as a reed, and only his 
head drooped as his rifle came into posi- 
tion. Some one said to the man whose shot, 
so far, was the winning one: 

"Git his nerve; else he'll beat you!" 

["^593 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

There are no restrictive rules on the com- 
ments or actions of contestants or spectators 
— there is usually a steady flow of raillery 
toward the one at the shooting-post. To get 
Hatfield's nerve, the man ran forward wav- 
ing his hat, offering his services to get a fly 
off Hatfield's gun. The rifle-barrel con- 
tinued slowly to rise. There was no recog- 
nition of the incident, no movement seen in 
the tall figure. Then his opponent talked 
and sang; and as this produced no noticeable 
effect, he danced, and stooping, began "to 
cut the pigeonwing" directly under the 
rifle-barrel. 

At this a soundless chuckle swept over 
Hatfield's shoulders. With a face motion- 
less he drew backward his gun and turning 
quietly, spat out a quid of tobacco as if it 
were all that interfered with his aim. He 
again slowly raised his rifle and fired, de- 
spite continued efforts to disconcert him. 

[i6o] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

He walked leisurely back to the crowd, 
rested his gun against a tree and took his 
seat on the ground. His only comment 
was: 

''I think I pestered him." 

The judges found that Hatfield had laid 
"the seam of the ball on center," and won. 

In these contests a mountain marksman 
will shoot eight or ten times and often so 
closely will each shot fall to the knife-blade 
cross that the hole cut by all of them in the 
white paper-target would be no larger than 
a man's thumb-nail. One of the favorite 
methods of "warming up" used by John 
Sowders, the closest competitor that Alvin 
York had in hundreds of matches, was to 
drive fifteen carpet-tacks halfway into a 
board, then step off until the heads of the 
tacks could just be seen, and with his rifle 
Sowders would finish driving twelve or thir- 
teen out of the fifteen. 



k 



[i6iS 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

It was not astuteness on the part of the 
German major, as he lay flat upon the 
ground in that Argonne Forest under the 
swaying radius of Alvin York's rifle, that 
caused the major to propose, when he found 
his men were given no time to get a clear 
shot at the American sergeant, that if Alvin 
York would stop killing them he would 
make the Germans surrender. In the shoot- 
ing-matches back in the mountains of Ten- 
nessee that American soldier had been 
trained to the minute for the mission then 
before him. But there were more powerful 
influences than his marksmanship that gave 
to Sergeant York the steadiness of nerve, 
the coolness of brain and the courage to 
fight to victory against such overwhelming 
odds. 

Back in the mountains in the days of 
William York, there were other forms of 
amusement than the shooting-matches. The 

[162] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

"log-rollings," the "house-raisings," which 
always ended in a feast or barbecue, con- 
tinued popular with the people. And they 
had "corn-huskings," to which all the neigh- 
bors came. 

The "corn-husking" was a winter sport. 
These, at times, were held at night under 
the light of hand-lanterns the mountaineers 
used to guide themselves with over the rough 
roads and along mountain-paths. But day 
or night, the husking ended with a feast. 
The ears to be husked were piled in a cone 
on the corn-crib floor, and usually at the bot- 
tom and in the very center of the cone a jug 
of whisky, plugged with a corn-cob stopper, 
was hidden. With songs and jokes they 
made sport of the work, each trying to be 
first to reach the jug. Once the jug was se- 
cured, the huskings ceased, and it was a fair 
contest between the corn's owner and his 
guests to see how much or how little could 

[163] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

be done before the jug-shaped goal was 
reached. 

Seated on the floor around the pile each 
of the buskers sought to make a narrow cut 
in the corn before him to reach the prize 
more quickly. It was the farmer's part to 
have the corn piled in such a toppling cone 
that the ears above would roll down as fast 
as the inroads could be made, and often the 
sliding ears entirely buried a busker. He 
must then draw back to the edge of the pile 
and start again. The shout of victory that 
went up when the prize was pulled forth 
warned the women folk at the house that 
they must make ready for the coming of 
hungry men with appetites well whetted on 
a product of corn. The next day, the farmer- 
host, without help, shucked the ears that 
were left upon his corn-crib floor. 

Alvin with the mountainsides as his play- 
ground grew sturdy and resolute. He had 

[164] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

been put to work by his father when first old 
enough to hold a hoe, to help about the 
house, pack water and bring in wood. The 
sparks that bounced from the anvil in the 
shadow of the cave fascinated him and he 
hung around the blacksmith's shop and 
learned to blow the bellows for his father 
and keep the fire hot. He soon grew large 
enough to swing the sledge, and he turned 
the shoes and made them ready. All of this 
wrapped hard muscles over a body that was 
unusually large for his age. His compan- 
ions began to call him ^The Big-un" and the 
by-name still clings to him. This, together 
with a calmness and an unmatched reserve, 
gave him the prestige of leader among his 
boy associates. At the age of fifteen he 
swung the sledge with either hand and was 
a man's match in wrestling bouts. One of 
his neighbors gave this view of him: 

"Alvin wuz a quiet, straight-going boy. 

^6^1 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

When he started to shoe a mule he always 
did hit no matter how troublesome the mule. 
He wuz so quiet about what he wuz doing 
that we never noticed much o' that side of 
his character before he went away. But 
now we see hit." 

In a season of prosperity William York 
moved from the cave and built a black- 
smith's shop beside the road where it forks, 
where one of the forks turns down the 
middle of the spring-branch bed, on its 
way to the mill and to Byrdstown. 

And he and Mary remodeled their home, 
making a two-room cabin of it. Eleven 
children were born to them — eight boys and 
three girls. 

Most of the winters of the thirty years 
of married life pressed privations upon 
them. Much of the seventy-five acres was 
poor soil, and the earnings from the shop 
were small. The charge of William York 

[i66] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

for blacksmith's work was always made in 
full realization that it was something done 
for a friend and neighbor. Seldom was a 
job done for cash. Instead, at some time 
that was convenient to the customer, he 
would call and ask the amount he owed, 
and usually from William York's book of 
memory the account was made out. And 
not in thirty years was it disputed, or held 
to be exorbitant. 

There have been winters of privation m 
the valley for all of those dependent upon 
small acreage and uncertain crops, but there 
was no real want or suffering from the lack 
of the necessaries of life. Then, as it is to- 
day, the community spirit in the "Valley of 
the Three Forks o' the Wolf" stood guard 
at the mountain passes and no real poverty 
could enter. The farmers' bins were open 
to any neighbor in need. The storekeeper 
willingly waited until some livestock were 

C167] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

sold, or even until the next crop came in. 
For the wants of his family there was credit 
I for the man who lived in the valley and 
worked. He could not speculate on the 
wealth of his neighbor, but there was never 
the need of a real need. Old Coonrod Pile's 
theory of the distinctive difference in the 
location of trouser patches is still regarded 
as a sound basis for business transactions. 
Those who have tried to live there upon as 
little work as they could do have sooner or 
later followed the path of the setting sun, 
and from the valley that indents the western 
slope of the great mountain range, that path 
leads downward. 

A visitor from the city once asked Mrs. 
York if she did her own work: 

"Sure enough," the little lady said, "and 
part of other people's. We had to. To raise 
so many children and keep them right is a 
great big job." 

[i68] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

A number of years went by in the period 
of Alvin's boyhood when no school was held 
that he could attend. The school term was 
only for three months, beginning early in 
July. It was found impractical to hold ses- 
sions in the winter, for many of the children 
lived long distances away and the branches 
from the mountain springs that crossed the 
roadways and fed the River Wolf, would go 
on rampages that could hold the pupils wa- 
ter-bound over night. The schools in the 
mountains received no aid from the state and 
in the remote districts it was difficult to se- 
cure teachers except in the pleasant summer 
months. The school term could not begin 
earlier than July, for it must wait until crops 
were laid by, for the students ranged in ages 
from six to twenty years, and the larger boys 
were needed on the farms. Then it was the 
time for the potatoes to be gathered, and 
tomatoes hung red upon the vine and were 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEG PL 



i^ 



ready for pulling. The fall period of the 
farm was on. 

The progress which Sergeant York was 
able to make in all the years of his school 
life would be about equal to the completion 
of the third grade of a public school. He 
was not sufficiently advanced to become in- 
terested in reading and self-instruction be- 
fore he was called to the army. He had been 
but a few miles away from the valley, where 
the men, as do other men of the mountains, 
live in the open of the farm and forest and 
think in terms of their environments. The 
need of an education had not come home to 
him. 

It was thus equipped that Sergeant York 
came into the presence of the generals of 
the Allied armies and sat at banquet boards 
with the leading men of this country in poli- 
tics and business. 

But never in the experiences that have 



[170] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

been crowded into the past two years of his 
life has he met a situation he could not com- 
mand, or one that broke his calmness and 
reserve. 

Clearly and quickly he thinks, but those 
thoughts flow slowly into words. He is 
keenly appreciative of his own limitations 
and quietly he observes everything around 
him. From early childhood he had been 
taught to be swift and keen in observation — 
the rustling of a leaf might be related to a 
squirrel's presence, and behind each mov- 
ing shadow there is a cause and a meaning. 

When he came to Prauthoy, France, the 
soldiers sought to honor him by having him 
carry the Division flag in the horse show. 
All was new to him and he was told but little 
of the routine expected of him. He had be- 
come the man whom all the American sol- 
diers wished to see, and his presence was the 
feature of the occasion. The officers of his 

[171] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

own regiment watched him closely, and not 
a mistake did he make in all the day's ma- 
neuvers. A comment of one of the officers 
was: "He seems always instinctively to 
know the right thing to do." 

He came from a cabin in the backwoods 
of Tennessee but he was raised under influ- 
ences that make real men. A boy's ideal, in 
his early life, is the father who guides him, 
and Sergeant York had before him a char- 
acter that was picturesque in its rugged man- 
hood and honesty, and inspiring in its de- 
votion to right and justice. The very priva- 
tions he endured and that he saw influencing 
his home throughout his childhood were due 
to principle, for William York would owe 
no man beyond the period of his promise to 
pay. In the light of the sparks from the an- 
vil in the shop in the cave, sparks that burned 
brighter even than the light of day, a com- 
radeship between father and son was formed, 

[ 172 ] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

and they were companions until the boy 
reached manhood when the death of the 
father separated them. 

There was nothing pretentious about the 
home in which he was raised. It was but a 
cabin, yet the chairs, the tables were of sea- 
soned oak, hand-made, solid. The puncheon 
floor was worn smooth with use and over it 
was a polished glow from the care of clean- 
liness, showing purity was there. The walls 
were papered with newspapers. That was 
to keep out the winter's wind, but over the 
windows were curtains of white muslin, and 
a scarf of it ran the length of the simple 
board mantel-shelf, and in season the blos- 
som of some flower swayed there. Within 
the home, no angry words were heard, but 
often there was laughter and song, and when 
the formulas for conduct were not followed, 
even the words of correction were affection- 
ately spoken. 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

As the boy's first steps were guided by 
tender hands, so the proper way to walk 
through life was pointed out with gentle 
words and simple truths. The mother's 
teachings were the products of an untrained 
mind, but her philosophies came from a 
brain that has the power to think clearly and 
quickly and is never influenced by either 
anger or excitement — qualities transmitted 
eminently to her son. This little mother in 
the mountains, unread and untutored, with 
only the dictates of her own heart to guide 
her, had early adopted as her guiding phil- 
osophy the belief that the greatest thing in 
life is love. 

So the impressionable, observant boy real- 
ized that life in the rugged mountains 
around him called for strength and endur- 
ance, but in his home, or wherever his 
mother was concerned there must be gentle- 
ness and love. 

[ml 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

And she has been the greatest influence in 
his life. He has always listened to her coun- 
sels, except in a brief period of wildness in 
young manhood. As his standard of life 
was formed under her teachings, it may 
be again said of him — but this time from 
the moral standpoint: ^^He seems always 
instinctively to know the right thing to 
do." 

It was the love for his mother, his love of 
his homelife in Pall Mall — and the sweet- 
heart who was waiting for him there — that 
called him back to the "Valley of the Three 
Forks o' the Wolf" after he had gone out 
into the world and won fame among men. 

The very sunlight falls gently on the 
verdant beauty of that valley, and the seven 
mountains rise around it as tho they would 
shield it from the contending currents of 
the world. 

Over the valley there comes a long gray 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

dawn, for the sun is high in the heavens 
when its slanting rays first fall on the silver 
waters of the Wolf. And through this dawn 
the men are moving, feeding stock, harness- 
ing their teams, and many of them sing as 
they ride to their work in the fields, for they 
are content. The tinkling of the bells on the 
cows grow fainter as the cows browse along 
the paths that lead to their mountain pas- 
tures. Up and down the road in compan- 
ionable groups the pigs are moving, audibly 
condoling with each other over the lack of 
business methods that caused the loss of the 
location of the entrance to the field of corn. 
A crow flaps lazily across the valley, and 
over the crest of the mountain the sun 
comes up. 

And the summer twilight there is long, 
and as it dips into night a drowsiness rises 
fog-like over the valley. When a half-moon 
hangs between the mountains its light is 

[176] 



THE MOLDING OF A MAN 

that of drooping drowsy lids. The lamps 
in the cabins on the mountainsides gleam but 
a brief time and go out. The descending 
of the shade of night is the universal bed- 
time of the mountain people. 

An occasional swinging light may still be 
'Seen, but it is the mountaineer giving atten- 
tion to some trouble among his stock. Then, 
there is silence over the valley, except for 
the chorus of katydids and the whistle of the 
gray owl to his mate in the woods. Now 
and then there comes the soft, faint clank of 
a cow-bell, different from its sound as the 
cows run the road or feed in the pasture. 
It is a slow and sleepy tang that soothes the 
ear. 

But the mountain curfew is the bark of a 
dog. Somewhere up on the range a hound 
will call to another that all is well with him 
in his watch of the night, and the family he 
guards are all abed. The aroused neighbor 

[177] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

calls to the dog at the cabin next to him, and 
the message that "all's well" sweeps on the 
voices of the hounds on down the valley un- 
til it ends in an echo in the crags. 



[178] 



THE PEOPLE 

OF 

PALL MALL 




The People of Pall Mall 

|HEY are a tranquil people who 
pass their days as do those who 
now live in the ^^Valley of the 
Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free 
from invidious jealousies and the blight of 
avarice toward each other, free from doubt 
of the rectitude of their daughters and re- 
lieved from solicitude that the future of 
their sons, if they remain in the valley, will 
be influenced by dissipation or dishonesty — 
a people who find in the changes of the 
weather and its effect upon crops their chief 
cause for worry. 

Through the gray dawn the farmer looks 
up to the skies for his weather report for 
the day. As he works he watches the clouds 
scurrying across the mountaintops, and 

[i8i] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

when he notes they are banking against the 
unseen summit of the Blue Mountains that 
rises to the east, he knows that rain is soon 
to come. Some local unknown bard, watch- 
ing those banking clouds, has left a lyric to 
his people, and I heard a gray-bearded 
mountaineer singing it as he predicted the 
break of a summer drought: 

"The sun rose bright 

But hid its head soon, 
'Twill rain a-fore night 

Ef hit don't rain a-fore noon.'* 

With their homes back in the mountains 
nearly fifty miles from the railway, with a 
journey before them over rocky roads and 
up mountainsides to the other communi- 
ties of Fentress county, the people of Pall 
Mall live in the communion and democracy 
of one great family. Children call old men 
by their Christian names. In it is not the 
slightest element of disrespect, and it is in- 

[182] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

stead an appreciated propriety which the 
old men recall as the custom of their boy- 
hood. Rev. R. C. Pile, pastor of the Church 
of Christ in Christian Union, the church of 
the valley, is *^Rosier" to everyone. All 
worship together in the same church ; all toil 
alike in the fields. In the predial,, peaceful 
routine of their days there is a positive simi- 
larity. A farmer will ride direct to the 
cornfield or the meadow of a neighbor, 
knowing the neighbor will be found at work 
there. And, as through the gray dawn of 
the day they look up to the skies, the wish 
of one for rain will be found to be the 
community desire. 

The social meeting-point of the people of 
the valley is the general store of John Ma- 
rion Rains. The storehouse sits by the road- 
side at the foot of a mountain in the western 
end of the valley, just where the road tum- 
bles down to the solid log cabin old Coonrod 

[183] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

Pile had built, to the spring and the York 
home. 

One end of the long porch of the store- 
house, as it runs with the road, is but a step 
from the ground, and the mountain falls 
away until the floor is conveniently up to 
the height of a wagon's bed ; then the road 
dips again until the porch is on a level with 
the saddle-stirrups and the women dismount 
with ease from their high-backed, tasseled 
side-saddles as they come in sunbonnets and 
ginghams. 

The men of the mountains seldom hurry 
on any mission. Their walk is a slow and 
foot-sure tread. When they come to the 
store, if only for a plug of tobacco, they 
remain with John Marion for a social hour 
or more. Their purchase is an incident, the 
last act before they depart. 

It is rare during the daylight hours that 
someone is not sitting on the porch, or in 

[184] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

one of the chairs of the row that skirts the 
show-cased counter just within the door, or 
somewhere upon the open horseshoe kegs 
that border the floor of the counter opposite. 
They are waiting to hear if anything new has 
happened, for all the news of the neighbor- 
hood comes to the store. The storekeeper is 
sure to know whether the stranger seen pass- 
ing along the road in the morning stopped at 
the York's, or went on to Possum Trot or 
to Byrdstown. 

The very commodities upon the shelves 
and counters of that store are in friendly 
confusion. Canned meats, pepper, candy, 
soap and chewing-tobacco may be found in 
one partition ; while next to them, groceries, 
shotgun-shells, powder and chinaware are in 
a position of prominence according to the 
needs of the past purchaser. In the rear, 
piled high, are overalls and "store clothes," 
hats and shoes. 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

But the counter, facing the shelves of 
dress-goods for the women, is free of ob- 
structions, and its surface is worn smooth 
and polished by the years of unrolling of 
bolts of cloth, while at every quarter-yard 
along the counter's rear edge is a shining 
brass tack-head — the yardstick of the de- 
partment. A pair of large shears swing 
prominently from an upright partition. 
The department is orderly and neat, a mute 
tribute to those who patronize it. 

Into the show-cases has crept every ar- 
ticle of small dimension that had no habitat 
or kind upon the shelves around — from laces 
to lead pencils. Upon nails in the rafters of 
the ceiling swing buckets and dippers and 
lamps, currycombs and brushes. 

Off in an L that runs at a right angle from 
the main store are bacon and tires for wagon 
wheels, country-cured hams and brooms, 
flour, kerosene and plows. 

[i86] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

Under the counter by the door is an open 
wooden box of crackers ,and its exact loca- 
tion and the volume of the supply are known 
to every child in the mountains around. Out 
of it comes their lagnappe for making a 
journey to the store. 

Beside the door upon a shelf sits the v^a- 
ter-bucket, kept cool by frequent replenish- 
ing from the York spring. Here every man 
who enters stops; and, after he has shifted 
his quid of tobacco, looked around, and 
made his cheerful greeting a hearty one 
with, "Howdy people!" he lifts the dipper 
filled with its pleasing refreshment — and 
the surplus goes accurately, in a crystal 
curve, to the back of some venturesome 
chicken that has come upon the store porch. 

Above the door as you enter hangs a 
stenciled, uneven, unpunctuated sign, "NO 
CREDIT CASH OR BARTER." But 
that sign has lost its potency. It is yellow 

[187] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

with age and no longer is there anyone who 
believes in it. It was hung when John 
Marion first opened his store, and before he 
knew his people and wanted cash or barter 
for his wares. 

There is trading every day that is barter. 
But it is the women bringing chickens under 
their arms, or a basket of eggs. The eggs 
are deposited in a box, the storekeeper 
counting them aloud as he packs them for 
shipment; or one of the eleven Rains' ^^kids" 
is bestirred to the barn with the chickens, 
where they remain in semicaptivity until the 
tgg and poultry man, in an old canvas cov- 
ered schooner, comes on his weekly rounds. 
And the cash value to the barter is traded to 
a cent. A ^^poke" of flour or of sugar or a cut 
of tobacco usually evens the transaction. 

It is many a journey around the store that 
John Marion makes in a day. The decision 
to purchase each article is announced slowly 

[i88] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

and as tho it were the only thing desired. 
The plump and genial storekeeper goes lei- 
surely for it, and with a smile of satisfaction 
places it before the customer. There is a 
moment of silence, then a journey for the 
next need, and it is only in balancing the 
barter that the merchant makes a suggestion. 
In a small glass show-case is refuting testi- 
mony that the sign over the door of NO 
CREDIT had been discredited long ago. 
The charge account is open to everyone. 
A memorandum of the purchase is made 
upon a strip torn from a writing-tablet or 
upon a piece of wrapping-paper and tossed 
into the show-case, among many others of 
its kind, until the customer ^^comes around 
to settle up." Then, with an unerring in- 
stinct, John Marion can pull from the 
tumbled pile of memoranda the records of 
the charges he seeks. If the charge account 
is to remain open until the next crop comes 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

in, on some rainy day he will transcribe the 
charge to his day-book. 

The clocks of the valley are not controlled 
by the government's or the railroads' stand- 
ard of time. They go by "sun time" and 
are regulated by the hour the almanacs say 
the sun should rise. John Marion winds the 
store clock after it has run down and he sets 
it by no consultation with anything but his 
feeling as to what hour of the day it should 
be. 

At least once a week every man who lives 
in the valley is at the store, but Saturday is 
the popular meeting-time. When the chairs 
and the row of horseshoe kegs are occupied, 
the men rest their hands behind them on the 
counter and swing to a place of comfort 
upon it, or they sit upon the window-sills, 
keeping well within the range of raillery 
that welcomes the coming and speeds the 
parting guest. It is a good-natured humor 

[190] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

that these mountaineers love, quick as the 
crack of a rifle and as direct as its speeding 
ball. There is never an effort to wound. But 
always there is the open challenge to mea- 
sure resource and wit. 

Many a trade in mules that owners have 
ridden to the store has resulted from the de- 
fense against the mule-wise critics who sev- 
eral times outnumber the man who rode the 
mule. If the mount is a newly acquired one, 
especial pleasure is found in a seemingly 
serious pointing out why any sort of trade 
was a bad one for that particular animal. 

A mule trade is a measure of business 
capability. No lie is ever told in answer 
to a direct question, but no information is 
relinquished unless a question is asked. If 
no hand is passed over the mule's eyes, and 
there is no specific inquiry about the eyes 
before the trade is consummated, and the 
animal proves blind in one of them, the fault 

[191] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

lies in the mule-swapping ability of the new 
owner. Over no question could two men be 
seemingly so widely apart as the two when 
both are anxious to trade. They are jockey- 
ing for that "something to boot" which al- 
ways makes at least one participant satisfied 
in a mountain mule trade. 

There are pitfalls for the unwary in the 
conversations that pass across the store aisle. 
Bill Sharpe, who has spent eighty-two sum- 
mers in the valley — and the winters, as well 
— ^with seeming innocence started a discus- 
sion as to how far a cow-bell could be 
heard. He sat quietly as several compared 
their experiences while hunting cattle in 
the mountains. Finally the old man said 
his hearing was not so good as it used to 
be, but he remembered once "hearing a 
cow-bell all the way from Overton county." 
Down the line a rural statistician figured it 
must be seventy miles from Pall Mall to 

[192] 





''The people of Pall Mall live in farmhouses that dot the valley and 
in cabins on the mountainsides. But the social meeting-point is the 
general store of John Marion Rains. The storekeeper is sure to know 
whether the stranger seen passing along the road stopped at the Yorks' 
or went on to Possum Trot or Byrdstown." 



' 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

the nearest point in Overton county, and the 
jests began to explode in the old man's vicin- 
ity. He conceded many changes since he 
was young, but so far as he could see there 
was evidently no improvement in man's 
hearing powers. When all his efforts to 
secure a side bet that he could prove his 
assertion were futile, he explained: 

* Wall, boys, ye got away. En once I won 
two gallons o' whisky on hit. I was in Over- 
ton county. I bought a cow. As she had a 
bell on her, and I drove her home, I heard 
that cow-bell all the way from Overton 
county." 

On Saturday afternoon, or a rainy after- 
noon, when Alvin York and the ^Wright 
boys," and one of them, "Will" Wright, is 
president of the bank at Jamestown; Ab 
Williams, gray of hair and bent, but vigor- 
ous of tongue; his son, Sam Williams, tall 
and straight as an Indian and equally up- 

[193] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

standing for his opinions; John Evans, a 
local justice of the peace; Bill Sharpe, who 
lives in the shadow of ^'Old Crow"; T. C. 
Frogge, of Frogge's Chapel, who farms, 
preaches or teaches school as the demand 
arises; "Paster" Pile and his brother, Virgil 
Pile, who has been County Trustee; when 
any of these are among those gathered at 
the store, there is a tournament of wit, with 
a constant change of program. 

Many a time John Marion is compelled to 
retreat behind a grin when in a lull "a shot" 
is taken at him, and his smile is his acknowl- 
edgment that he cannot be expected to add 
up a charge-slip and at the same time defend 
himself against a care-free man upon a keg 
of horseshoes. 

But the storekeeper is never taken by sur- 
prize at the badinage of his patrons. One 
afternoon after a long wait and another day 
in the valley seemed sure to pass with no 

[194] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

unusual incident, an old fellow arose from 
one of the chairs, stretched himself, and 
said: 

"John Marion, I want a shift o' shirts. 
Else, I got to go to bed to git this-un 
washed." 

The storekeeper laid out several of dark 
color: 

"Here's some you can wear without 
change till the shirt falls off." 

"That's right, John; gimme one thet 
won't advertise thet the ole woman's neg- 
lectin' me." 

Another was uncertain about the size of 
a pair of overalls for his boy: 

"Dunknow, John Marion! One tight 
enough to keep the bees out — a kid shore 
wastes energy when a bee gits in 'em." 

When it is "good dusk" the storekeeper 
closes the wooden shutters and fastens them 
by looping a small cotton string over a nail. 

^95] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

All the mountaineers are on their way home, 
but they had not parted without an inter- 
change of invitation: 

"Home with me, boys; home! Ef I can't 
feed ye well, I'll be friendly." 

Or, maybe, the invitation is not so sweep- 
ing, and holds a reservation : 

"Spend the night with me! I'll not stop 
you; I'll let you leave afore breakfast." 

Over any gathering at the store a pall of 
silence descends when a stranger rides up. 
If the newcomer is a new drummer unfamil- 
iar with the ways of the mountains, if he 
comes imbued with the belief that the voice 
with the smile wins, and talkatively radi- 
ates his individual idea of fellowship and 
democracy, one by one his auditors silently 
drop away. To them, an insincere, a false 
note of democracy has been struck. Perhaps 
around the door there will linger some of 
the mountain boys waiting to satisfy their 

[196] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

curiosity over the contents of the drummer's 
cases. 

John Marion Rains always listens to the 
story of prices, but his shelves are really re- 
plenished by the drummers who drive to the 
barn instead of the store, who unhitch their 
own horses and feed them from the store- 
keeper's supply of corn, who come into the 
center of the crowd only after they have un- 
obtrusively lingered awhile in the fringe 
of it. 

One afternoon one of these mountaineers 
who had withdrawn to the porch, unhitched, 
without being solicited, a drummer's horse, 
and he had trouble in pulling off a loose 
shoe and renailing it. The drummer wanted 
to pay for the work, but the mountaineer 
shook his head. The deed had been done 
for the horse. The visitor insisted, and 
finally the price was fixed: 

^^Bout a nickel!" 

[197] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

A mountaineer seldom asks questions. In- 
stead he makes a statement of that which 
appears to him to be the fact, and if un- 
challenged or uncorrected, it is accepted as 
the proper deduction. Early in my visit to 
Pall Mall I learned my lesson. 

*^Have you lived all your life in the val- 
ley?" I asked an old mountaineer whom 
I met on the road as he was carrying on his 
shoulder a sack of corn to the mill. 

Into his eye there came a light of playful- 
ness, then pity, quickly to be followed by a 
twinkle of fun. He simply could not let 
the opening pass. 

"Not yit," he said. 

Later I saw a little fellow of six years of 
age chasing a chicken barren of feathers 
over a yard that was barren of grass. When 
I accused him of maliciously picking that 
chicken, his face was a spot of smiles as he 
vigorously denied it. 

[198] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

"Are you going to school?" I asked him. 

The smile changed to a look of surprize at 
an inquiry so out of line with his immediate 
activities. 

"When it starts," he called back as he and 
the chicken disappeared under the cabin. 

I dropped questions and adopted the 
direct statement as a method of procedure 
in which there was less personal liability. 

Alvin Terry, dressed in a patched cor- 
duroy with a hunting-pouch made of the 
skin of a gray fox and with his long rifle in 
his hand, stopped at the store and told how 
he "got a bear." There was a hunter's pride 
in the achievement with apparently little 
value given to the bravery of the personal 
role he had played. 

He had been on a hunt back in the hills. 
His dogs had gone ahead of him and he 
"knowed they had somethin'." When he 
came in sight of them they rushed into a 

[199] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

cave and some came out yelping and bloody. 
When they wouldn't go back, then it was he 
"sized hit wur a bear." He looked at the 
mountains around him, but there was not 
a cabin in sight where he could get help. 

"Ez the dogs couldn't git out whatever 
wuz in there, and wuz only keepin' hit in, 
I sat down to think hit over. I lowed I 
would tell some one en folks would say, 
'that's the man who had a bear in a cave, 
and did not git him.' Ef I went in en come 
out alive with scratches on me, folks would 
say 'a bear done that, but he got the bear.' " 

He cut a long pole, fastened a pine knot to 
the end of it and set it afire. Getting to the 
side of the mouth of the cave he began 
slowly to push in the burning knot, ''leavin' 
the channel open ef anything wanted to 
come out." 

But the bear didn't come out, and the 
hunter grew afraid that the smoke would 

[ 200] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

not move his prey yet would prevent him 
seeing around in the cave if he had to go in. 
The cave's mouth was low, a rock hung over 
it and he could not crawl upon his hands and 
knees. 

^'I pushed the pine knot ez fur ez hit 
would go. I set my rifle, en pushed hit 
ahead of me. Got my knife where I could 
git hit. Went down flat en begun to pull 
myself on my elbows. When I could jes 
peep around a rock I seed the bear. He wuz 
settin' on his haunches, his head turned a- 
lookin' at the pine knot. I picked out a spot 
about three inches below his collar-bone, en 
never drew such a bead on anything. Then 
I tetched her off. Ye should have seed me 
come backward out o' there." 

He waited and there was no sound in the 
cave. He sent the dogs in and they would 
not come out at his call. He reloaded his 
rifle and began to crawl in again. 

[201] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

"As soon as I seed him I knowed he wuz 
dead. I got both hands on his paw and 
began to pull. He wuz heavier than I wuz, 
so I slid to him. I tried ketchin' my toes in 
the rocks, but I couldn't hold, en I never 
moved him." 

He went ten miles over the mountains to 
get help to pull his bear out of the cave. 

The language of the people of the Great 
Smokies and the Blue Ridge mountains 
is filled with a quaintness of expression. 
Many of their words and phrases that attract 
through their oddity were at one time in 
popular use and grammatically correct. 
These people are clinging to the dialect of 
their fathers who were Anglo-Saxons. The 
use of "hit" for "it" is not confined to the 
mountains, but the Old English grammars 
give "hit" as the neuter of the pronoun "he." 

"Uns," too, had once a grammatical sanc- 
tion, for "uon" or "un" was the Early En- 

[202] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

glish for "one," and "uns" was more than 
the one. In many parts of the South are 
found the expressions, "you-uns" and "we- 
uns.'' The mountaineer says "you-uns" 
when he is addressing more than one person. 
It is one of his plural forms for "you," and 
he is adopting an Early English ending. 
But the true mountaineer does not employ 
"we-uns." The "we" to him is plural, the 
suffix is superfluous. In the same way he 
says "ye" when speaking to more than one, 
but he uses "you" when addressing an indi- 
vidual. He seems, too, to make a distinction 
between "you-uns" and "ye." The former 
is usually the nominative and the latter the 
objective. 

When he wishes to convey the idea of 
past tense, the ending "ed" is popularly 
employed, but when he may he drops the 
"e." While he will properly use the present 
tense of a verb he goes out of his way to add 

[203] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

the "(e)d." So he says ^^know-d," "see-d." 
But he is not always consistent. He prefers 
^^kilt," the old form, to "killed." 

Generations passed in which they had 
little opportunity to attend school, and there 
are to-day a number of the older people of 
the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" 
who can not read nor write. Some of the 
younger generation have been away to col- 
lege, but, as with Alvin York, most of them 
grew to manhood with only a month or a 
month and a half at school during a year, 
with many years no school in session. 

The church is in the center of the valley at 
the edge of a grove of forest trees. It is a 
frame structure, built by the Methodists dur- 
ing the past century. The board walls of the 
interior are unplastered and unpainted, and 
the pews are movable benches. The pulpit 
is slightly elevated with a railing in front, 
ending in two pillars upon which rest the 

[204] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

preacher's Bible, song books and lamps. 
Along the entire front of the pulpit runs the 
mourners' bench. In the rear of the church 
a ladder rests against the wall and down 
toward it swings a rope from the open 
belfry. 

Every one in the valley attends church 
and there are but few who do not go to every 
service without regard to the denomination 
conducting it. They come on horse- and 
mule-back, on foot, in wagons in the beds of 
which are chairs for the entire family. In 
summer many of the men wear their over- 
alls, and all, excepting the young men acting 
as escorts, come in their shirt-sleeves. Some 
of the women are in silks, but more of them 
are in ginghams, and many sunbonnets are 
to be seen. At the door of the church the 
men and women part and they sit in separate 
pews. 

I attended a service at the end of a revival 

[205] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

that was being conducted by the Rev. Mel- 
vin Herbert Russell, of the Church of Christ 
in Christian Union, the frail and eager 
evangelist who three years before had 
brought Sergeant York to his knees before 
the altar of that church. 

It was an August day and the sun's rays 
fell into the valley without a single cloud for 
a screen. The little church was filled with 
worshipers, while many sat in the shade of 
the trees that. sheltered it, within the sound 
of the minister's voice. Down through the 
grove the hitched horses "stomped" and 
switched, but this was the only evidence of 
restlessness. 

The minister conducted the services in his 
shirt-sleeves, without collar, and with the 
sleeves rolled up. There is no organ in the 
church and he played a guitar as he led the 
earnest singing. 

The mountain evangelist had but few of 

[206] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

the pulpit arts of the minister, but he had the 
soul of a great preacher. His life, to him, 
was a mission to the unconverted to point out 
the imminence of death and its meaning. 
His belief had carried him beyond and 
above the pleading of the uncertainty of 
death to arouse fear in the hearts of his con- 
gregation. Instead, to him, the great clock 
of time was actually ticking off an oppor- 
tunity which the unconverted could not per- 
mit to pass. In his earnest pleading his voice 
would rise from a conversational tone until 
it rang penetratingly through the hall, and 
he would emphasize his words with a start- 
ling resound from his open palm upon the 
altar-rail. 

The mountaineers had brought their en- 
tire families, and during the service the 
smaller children would fall asleep, to 
awaken with a cry at the changing vibra- 
tions. Up and down the sounding, carpet- 

[207] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

less aisles the parents would pass, carrying 
out some child to comfort it. 

But the incidents were unnoticed by the 
minister, nor did they break the chant of 
amens or the growing number of repetitions 
of the minister's words by the devout wor- 
shipers. When the eyes of the auditors were 
turned from the evangelist they reverently 
sought the face of some expected convert. 
In the service, in the feelings of the people 
there was real religion. 

Sundays pass when there is no preaching 
in the church. Pastor Pile, the local min- 
ister, has several charges and can conduct the 
services at Pall Mall but once a month. But 
each Sunday morning there is Sunday 
School, and in the afternoon a singing-class. 
Some one of the York boys leads the unac- 
companied songs, and Alvin's leadership 
and interest in these services caused the 
catchy phrase, '^a singing Elder," to be a 

[208] 




"NO, I DIDN'T, NEATHER!" 

"Later I saw a little fellow of six years of age chasing a chicken 
that was barren of feathers over a yard that was barren of_ grass. 
When I accused him of maliciously picking that chic'ien, his face 
was a spot of smiles as he vigorously denied it." ^ 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

part of nearly every newspaper story of him 
that went over the country. 

The singing-class draws to the church on 
Sunday afternoon the younger element of 
the community. When the service is over, 
some go for a swim in the Wolf River 
which runs along the foot of the grove, or 
on a grassless space under a giant oak on the 
schoolhouse-yard there will be a game of 
marbles. It is the old-fashioned "ring men" 
that they play, where five large marbles are 
placed in a small square marked in the dust, 
one marble on each corner and one in the 
middle. 

Over in France when the officers of Ser- 
geant York's regiment were trying to obtain 
all the facts of his wonderful exploit, they 
asked him what he did with the German 
officers he had captured when he started to 
bring in his line of prisoners. His reply was 
a simile from his boyhood in the mountains: 

[209] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

"I jes made a middler out of myself." 

Among all the American officers present 
there was but one who recognized his refer- 
ence to the old marble game. 

The death of his father when Alvin was 
twenty-one, relaxed a hand that had pro- 
tected and guided him more than he real- 
ized. His two older brothers were married 
and he became the head of the family of 
ten that remained. He left to his younger 
brothers the care of the crops upon the farm 
and he hired out on any job that brought an 
extra revenue. In summer he worked on 
neighboring farms, and in winter hauled 
staves and merchandise when the roads 
could be traveled, or logged in the lumber 
camps. 

He formed new associates and under the 
new influences began to drink and gamble. 
With his companions on Saturday and Sun- 
day he would ^^go to the Kentucky line." 

[2IO] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

Through the mountains along the state- 
line between Tennessee and Kentucky there 
were road-houses, or saloons, that were so 
built that one-half of the house would be in 
Kentucky and one-half in Tennessee. The 
keeper paid his federal license and was free 
from the clutches of the United States 
Government. But he avoided the licenses 
of the states by carrying a customer from 
Tennessee into the Kentucky side of the 
house for the business transaction, and the 
Kentuckian was invited into Tennessee. 
No customer of the state-line saloons 
could swear before a grand jury that he 
had violated the liquor laws of his state, 
and he was not subject to a summons at his 
home by the grand jury of the county or 
state in which he made his purchase. Upon 
receipt of a "grapevine'^ signal that officers 
were approaching, the entire stock of liquids 
would disappear and when the officers ar- 

[211] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

rived the saloonkeeper would be at work in 
the fields of his farm. 

The nearest state-line saloon to Pall Mall 
was seven miles by the road and but little 
over half the distance by paths on the 
mountains. 

This was the only period of Alvin's life 
when the wishes of his mother did not con- 
trol him. These week-end sprees were re- 
laxation and fun, and he worked steadily the 
remainder of the week. In them he grew 
jovial and the friends he drew around him 
were fun, not trouble, makers. His physical 
strength and the influence of his personality 
were quickly used to check in incipiency any 
evidence of approaching disorder. 

His "shooting-up" consisted of pumping 
lead from an old revolver he owned into the 
spots on beech trees as he and his friends 
galloped along the road. And he became so 
expert that he would pass the revolver from 

[212] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

hand to hand and empty it against a tree as 
he went by. When the eight Germans 
charged him in the fight in the Argonne, he 
never raised his automatic pistol higher than 
his cartridge-belt. 

His mother knew the latent determination 
of her boy and she was ever in dread that 
there might arise some trouble among the 
men when he was away on these drinking 
trips. 

"Alvin is jes like his father," she said. 
"They were both slow to start trouble, but 
ef either one would git into hit, they'd go 
through with the job and there'd be 
a-hurtin'." 

But since the fist fights of boyhood Alvin 
York has never had a personal encounter. 
His intents and deeds do not lead him into 
difficulties, and in his eye there is a calm blue 
light that steadies the impulses of men given 
to explosions of passion and anger. 

[213] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

At a basket-dinner where he and his 
friends were drinking he took his last drink. 
To these outings the girls bring, in a woven, 
hickory basket, a dinner for two. The baskets 
are auctioned, the proceeds are given to some 
church charity, and the purchaser and the 
girl have dinner together. They are often 
expensive parties to a serious-minded moun- 
tain swain who can not surrender the day's 
privileges to a rival or will not yield his 
dignity and rights to fun-makers who en- 
liven the biddings by making the basket, 
brought by ^^his girl," cost at least as much 
as a marriage license. 

Alvin's mother had often pleaded with 
her boy that he was not his real self — not 
his better self — while drinking. Something 
happened at a basket-party in 1914 that 
caused the full meaning of his mother's 
solicitude to come to him. He left, de- 
claring he would never take another drink, 

[214] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

and his drinking and gambling days ended 
together. 

Late in the afternoons in the fall months, 
when the squirrels are out [so the story runs 
in the valley, but without confirmation 
from the Sergeant], Alvin would be seen 
leaving home with his gun. He would cut 
across the fields to the west and pass along 
the outskirts of the farm of Squire F. A. 
Williams. Those who saw him wondered 
why he should take this long course to the 
woods, while on the mountain above his 
home the oak. and beech masts were plenti- 
ful and other hunters were going there for 
the squirrels. 

About this same time, the wife of Squire 
Williams noted with pleasure that Gracie, 
her youngest daughter — a girl of sixteen 
with golden hair and eyes that mirror the 
blue of the sky — went willingly to the 

[215] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

woodlots for the cows. When she returned 
with them she was singing, and this, too, 
pleased Mrs. Williams. 

The road from Squire Williams' home to 
the church passes the York home; and, after 
the service, as far as his gate, Alvin would 
often walk with them. As Gracie was silent 
and timid when any stranger was near, so 
diffident that when on their way home from 
church she walked far away from Alvin, the 
neighbors for a long while had no explana- 
tion for Alvin's squirrel-hunts along the 
base of the mountain instead of up toward 
the top of it; and Mrs. Williams, at her 
home, heard so many gunshots off in the 
woods in the course of a day that she at- 
tached no significance to them. 

But Alvin's and Gracie's meetings along 
the shaded roadway that leads to the 
Williams home were discovered, and Mrs. 
Williams put a ban upon them — for Gracie 

[216] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

was too young, she maintained, to have 
thoughts of marriage. 

The real facts in that mountain courtship 
are known to but two, and even now are 
as carefully guarded as tho the romance 
had not become a reality and culminated 
happily. 

But the neighbors have fragments out of 
which they build a story, and it varies with 
the imagination of the relator. The big 
Sergeant's confirmation or denial is a smile 
and a playful, taunting silence that leaves 
conclusion in doubt. 

There is a path that leads from the store 
around the side of the mountain that edges 
a shoulder between the store and the 
Williams home. A little off this path is a 
large flat rock. Around it massive beech 
trees grow and their boughs arch into a dome 
above the rock. There are carvings on the 
trunks of those trees that were not found 

[217] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

until the rock was selected as the altar for 
a woodland wedding at which the Governor 
of Tennessee officiated. 

When Gracie would come to the store she 
passed the York home on her way. Often, 
when alone, she would return by the moun- 
tain path. It was longer than by the road, 
but it was shaded by trees, and as it bends 
around the mountain glimpses of the valley 
could be seen. The rock ledge among the 
beech trees was not half way to her home, 
but it was a picturesque place to rest, and 
down below was the roof of the York home 
and the spring-branch, as it wound its way 
to the Wolf River. It was their favorite 
meeting-place. 

When the war broke in Europe, those who 
lived in the valley gave little heed to it. 
When there was talk of the United States' 
entry, there was deep opposition. They 

[218] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

were opposed to any war. The wounds of 
the Civil War had healed, but the scars it 
left were deep. The thought of another 
armed conflict meant more to the old people 
than it did to the younger generation. 

"I did not know," Alvin said of himself, 
*Vhy we were going to war. We never had 
any speakings in here, and I did not read the 
papers closely, and did not know the objects 
of the war. I did not feel I wanted to go." 

He had given up his work on the farm and 
was making more money than he had ever 
made before. The shortcut of the Dixie 
Highway — that part that runs from Louis- 
ville to Chattanooga — had been surveyed 
and was being graded through Fentress 
county. It runs through the "Valley of the 
Three Forks o' the Wolf." He was "driving 
steel on the pike," for his days in the black- 
smith shop had taught him to wield a sledge- 
hammer and many rocks were to be blasted 

[219] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

to make a roadway. For this he was receiv- 
ing $1.65 a day, for ten hours' work, while on 
the farm he had not been able to earn more 
than $25 a month, working from "can't see to 
can't see." 

When he joined the church he had given 
ihimself to it unreservedly. They were hold- 
ing many meetings and the church was grow- 
ing. He had become the Second Elder. At 
)the time, too, he was planning for the day 
/ when he could marry. 

In June following the country's entry into 
the war Alvin registered for the draft and 
in October at Jamestown took his ex- 
amination. 

"They looked at me, they weighed me," 
he told on his return, "and I weighed 170 
pounds and was 72 inches tall. So they said 
I passed all right!" 

He was with Pastor Pile, and he turned 
to him: 

[ 220] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

^'This means good-bye for me. But I'll 
go." 

After his registration his mother had 
never ceased to worry over his going to a 
v^ar so far away from her. 

The situation troubled him. At times he 
would see his mother looking steadily at 
him, and there was always a sadness in her 
face. He knew that she needed him, for the 
next oldest of the brothers of those who were 
at home was only seventeen. But his coun- 
try had asked him to stand by and would 
call him if it needed him. 

The struggle within him lasted for weeks. 
Then he asked that they seek no exemption 
for him. 

In his presence his mother never again re- 
ferred to his going, but he would see her 
troubled face watching him. 

But she talked with the influential men in 
the valley hoping there would be some sug- 

[221] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

gestion that would honorably relieve Alvin 
from the duty of going. Pastor Pile had 
gone ahead to see what he could do, and he 
learned that those who were "conscientious 
objectors" would not have to go. The tenets 
of his church, he held, were against all wars. 
Alvin was an elder; he had subscribed to 
and was living the principles of his religion. 
He hurried home to Mrs. York. 

But the soldier, himself, had to make the 
plea for exemption, no one could make it 
for him. 

Alvin never made it. 

In the middle of November his summons 
reached him. He had but twenty-four hours 
to respond. 

He sent a note to Gracie, telling her his 
"little blue card" had come and he asked 
her to meet him at the church — which al- 
ways stands open by the roadside. As they 
walked toward her home they arranged to 

[222 ] 



THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL 

meet the next morning at the rock under the 
beech trees, when she would leave to carry 
the cows to the pasture. And it was there 
she promised to marry him — when he re- 
turned from the war. 

Men at the store saw Alvin come down 
from the mountain and he could not escape 
some banterings over the success or failure 
of his early morning tryst. 

"Jes left it to her/' he is said to have 
frankly confessed, "she can have me for 
the takin' when I git back." 

He and his mother were alone in their 
home for several hours. When he left he 
stopped at the Brooks' porch where rela- 
tives and neighbors had assembled. As he 
walked away he turned, unexpectedly, up 
the path toward the rock on the mountain- 
side. It is now known he went there to kneel 
alone in prayer. 

When he came down to the store, to the 

[223] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

men waiting for him, he spoke with an as- 
sured faith he had not shown before. 

"I know, now, that I'll be back," he told 
them. 

His mother, weeping, tho hiding it from 
him, had slowly followed as far as the 
Brooks' porch. 

Alvin, looking back toward the old Coon- 
rod Pile home, saw her and waved to her, 
then hurried to the buggy that was to take 
him to Jamestown. 

As the grating of the moving buggy 
wheels on the road reached the Brooks 
porch, Mrs. York gave a cry that went to 
responsive hearts in every home in that part 
of the valley. And she secluded herself, and 
sobbed for days. 



[224] 



VI 

SERGEANT 
YORK'S 
OWN STORY 



i 






VI 

Sergeant York's Own Story 

HEN Alvin went to war he car- 



ried with him a small, red, cloth- 
covered memorandum book, 
which was to be his diary. He knew that 
beyond the mountains that encircled his 
home there was a world that would be new 
to him. He kept the little volume — now 
with broken-back and worn — constantly 
with him, and he wrote in it while in camp, 
on shipboard and in the trenches in France. 
It was in his pocket while he fought the 
German machine gun battalion in the 
Forest of Argonne. 

The book with its records was intended 
for no eyes but his own. Yet painstaking, 
using ink, he had headed the volume: ^^A 
History of places where I have been." 

£227] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

As a whole, the volume would be unintel- 
ligible to a reader, for while it records the 
things he wished to remember of his camp- 
life, the trip through England, his stay in 
France, and tells in order the "places he had 
been," it is made up of swift-moving notes 
that enter into no explanatory details. But 
to him the notations could — even in the eve- 
ning of his life — revive the chain of inci- 
dents in memory. His handling of his diary 
is typical of his mind and his methods. 

To him details are essential, but when they 
are done carefully and thoroughly their 
functions are performed and thereafter they 
are uninteresting. They are but the steps 
that must be taken to walk a given distance. 
His mind instead dwells upon the object of 
the walk. 

When he left his home at Pall Mall he 
reported to the local recruiting station at 
Jamestown, the county seat. He was sent 

[2283 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

to Camp Gordon near Atlanta, Ga., and 
reached there the night of November 16, 
1917. His diary runs: 

"I was placed in the 21st training bat- 
talion. Then I was called the first morning 
of my army life to police up in the yard all 
the old cigarette butts and I thought that was 
pretty hard as I didn't smoke. But I did 
it just the same." 

His history tells in one sentence, of 
months of his experience in training with 
the "awkward squad" and of his regimental 
assignment: 

"I stayed there and done squads right and 
squads left until the first of February, 1918, 
and then I was sent to Company G, 328 Inf. 
82nd Div." 

This was the "All America" Division^ 
made up of selected men from every state in 
the Union and in its ranks were the de- 
scendants of men who came from every 

[229] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

nation that composed the Allies that were 
fighting Germany. 

In his notes Alvin records temptations 
that came to him while at Camp Gordon : 

^'Well they gave me a gun and, oh my! 
that old gun was just full of grease, and I 
had to clean that old gun for inspection. So 
I had a hard time to get that old gun clean, 
and oh, those were trying hours for a boy 
like me trying to live for God and do his 
blessed will. . . . Then the Lord would 
help me to bear my hard tasks. 

"So there I was. I was the homesickest 
boy you ever seen." 

When he entered the army Alvin York 
stood six feet in the clear. There were but 
few in camp physically his equal. In any 
crowd of men he drew attention. The huge 
muscles of his body glided lithely over each 
other. He had been swinging with long, 
firm strides up the mountainsides. His arms 

1 230 ] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

and shoulders had developed by lifting hay- 
ladened pitchforks in the fields and in the 
swing of the sledge in his father's black- 
smith's shop. The military training coordi- 
nated these muscles and he moved among 
the men a commanding figure, whose quiet 
reserve power seemed never fully called into 
action by the arduous duties of the soldier. 

The strength of his mind, the brain force 
he possessed were yet to be recognized and 
tested. And even to-day, with all the experi- 
ences he has had and the advancement he 
has made, that force is not yet measured. It 
is in the years of the future that the real 
mission of Sergeant York will be told. 

He came out of the mountains of Tennes- 
see with an education equal to that of a child 
of eight or nine years of age, with no experi- 
ence in the world beyond the primitive, 
wholesome life of his mountain community, 
with but little knowledge of the lives and 

[231] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

customs, the ambitions and struggles of men 
who lived over the summit of the Blue 
Ridge and beyond the foot-hills of the 
Cumberlands. 

But he was wise enough to know there 
were many things he did not know. He was 
brave enough to frankly admit them. When 
placed in a situation that was new to him, he 
would try quietly to think his way out of it; 
and through inheritance and training he 
thought calmly. He had the mental power 
to stand at ease under any condition and 
await sufficient developments to justify him 
to speak or act. Even German bullets could 
not hurry nor disconcert him. 

He was keenly observant of all that went 
on around him in the training-camp. Few 
sounds or motions escaped him, though it 
was in a seemingly stoic mien that he con- 
templated the things that were new to him. 
In the presence of those whose knowledge or 

E232] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

training he recognized as superior to his own 
he calmly waited for them to act, and so 
accurate were his observations that the offi- 
cers of his regiment looked upon him as one 
by nature a soldier, and they said of him that 
he "always seemed instinctively to know the 
right thing to do." 

Placed at his first banquet board — the 
guest of honor — with a row of silver by his 
plate so different from the table service in 
his humble home, he did not misuse a piece 
from among them or select one in error. 
But throughout the courses he was not the 
first to pick up a needed piece. 

His ability to think clearly and quickly, 
under conditions that tried both heart and 
brain, was shown in the fight in the Argonne. 
With eight men, not twenty yards away, 
charging him with bayonets, he calmly de- 
cided to shoot the last man first, and to con- 
tinue this policy in selecting his mark, so 

[233] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

that those remaining would "not see their 
comrades falling and in panic stop and fire 
a volley at him." 

Military critics analyzing the tactics York 
used in this fight have been able to find no 
superior way for removing the menace of 
the German machine guns that were over 
the crest of the hill and between him and his 
regiment, than to form the prisoners he had 
captured in a column, put the officers in 
front and march directly to each machine 
gun-nest, compelling the German officers to 
order the gunners to surrender and to take 
their place in line. 

Calm and self-controlled, with hair of 
copper-red and face and neck browned and 
furrowed by the sun and mountain winds, 
enured to hardships and ready for them, 
this young mountaineer moved among his 
new-found companions at Camp Gordon. 
Reticent he seemed, but his answer to an in- 

[234] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

quiry was direct, and his quiet blue-eyes 
never shifted from the eyes of the man 
who addressed him. As friendships were 
formed, his moods were noted by his com- 
rades. At times he was playful as a boy, 
using cautiously, even gently, the strength 
he possessed. Then again he would remain, 
in the midst of the sports, thoughtful, and 
as tho he were troubled. 

Back in the mountains he had but little 
opportunity to attend school, and his sen- 
tences were framed in the quaint construc- 
tion of his people, and nearly all of them 
were ungrammatical. There were many 
who would have regarded him as ignorant. 
By the standards that hold that education is 
enlightenment that comes from acquaintance 
with books and that wisdom is a knowledge 
of the ways of the world, he was. But he 
had a training that is rare; advantages that 
come to too few. 

[235] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

From his father he inherited physical 
courage; from his mother, moral courage. 
And both of them spent their lives develop- 
ing these qualities of manhood in their boy. 
His father hiked him through the mountains 
on hunts that would have stoutened the heart 
of any man to have kept the pace. And he 
never tolerated the least evidence of fear of 
man or beast. He taught his boy to so live 
that he owed apology or explanation to no 
man. 

While I was at Pall Mall, one of his 
neighbors, speaking of Alvin, said: 

^'Even as a boy he had his say and did his 
do, and never stopped to explain a statement 
or tell what prompted an act. Left those 
to stand for themselves.'' 

And the little mother, whose frail body 
was worn from hard work and wracked by 
the birth of eleven children, was before him 
the embodiment of gentleness, spirit and 

C236] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

faith. When he came from the hunt into the 
door of that cabin home and hung his gun 
above the mantel, or came in from the fields 
where the work was physical, he put from 
him all feeling of the possession of strength. 
When he was with her, he was as gentle as 
the mother herself. 

She, too, wanted her son to live in such a 
way that he would not fear any man. But 
she wanted his course through life to be over 
the path her Bible pointed out, so that he 
would not have the impulse to do those 
deeds that called for explanation or de- 
manded apology. 

From her he inherited those qualities of 
mind that gave him at all times the full pos- 
session of himself. Her simple, home-made 
philosophy was ever urging her boy to 
*^think clear through" whatever proposition 
was before him, and when in a situation 
where those around him were excited "to 

C237] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

slow down on what he was doing, and think 
fast." 1 have heard her say: 

"There hain't no good in gitting excited; 
you can't do what you ought to do." 

She had not seen a railroad-train until she 
went to the capital of Tennessee to the pres- 
entation of the medal of honor given her 
son by the people of the state. She came 
upon the platform of the Tabernacle at 
Nashville wearing the sunbonnet of stays 
she wore to church in the '^Valley of the 
Three Forks o' the Wolf." The Governor 
in greeting her, lifted off the sunbonnet. His 
possession was momentary, for Mrs. York 
recaptured it in true York style. Her smil- 
ing face and nodding head told that the 
Governor had capitulated. It was panto- 
mime, for the thousands were on their feet 
waving to her and cheering her. Calm and 
still smiling, she looked over the demonstra- 
tion in the vast auditorium more as a spec- 

[238] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

tator than as the cause of the outburst of ap- 
plause. Later, at the reception at the Gov- 
ernor's mansion, guests gathered around her 
and she held a levee that crowded one of 
the big drawing-rooms. Those who sought 
to measure wit with her found her never at 
a loss for a reply, and woven through her 
responses were many similes drawn from 
her mountain life. 

Under her proctorship the moral courage 
of her son had developed. In her code of 
manhood there was no tolerance for infir- 
mity of purpose, and mental fear was as 
degrading and as disintegrating as physical 
cowardice. He had been a man of the world 
in the miniature world that the miles of 
mountains had enclosed around him. He 
had lived every phase of the life of his 
people, and lived them openly. When he 
renounced drinking and gambling he was 
through with them for all time. When he 

[239] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

joined the church, his religion was made 
the large part of the new plan of his life. 

It was while at Camp Gordon that he rec- 
onciled his religious convictions with his 
patriotic duty to his country. 

The rugged manhood within him had 
made him refuse to ask exemption from ser- 
vice and danger on the ground that the doc- 
trine of his church opposed war. But his 
conscience was troubled that he was deliber- 
ately on the mission to kill his fellow man. 
It was these thoughts that caused his com- 
panions to note his moody silences. 

In behalf of his mother, who, with many 
mothers of the land, was bravely trying to 
still her heart with the thought that her son 
was on an errand of mercy, the pastor of the 
church in the valley made out the strongest 
case he could for Alvin's exemption, and 
sent it to the officers of his regiment. 

Lieut. Col. Edward Buxton, Jr., and Maj. 

[240] 




"From his father he inherited physical courage, from his mother 
moral courage— and both spent their lives developmg those qualities 
of manhood in their boy." 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

E. C. B. Danford, who was then the captain 
of York's company, sent for him. They ex- 
plained the conditions under which it were 
possible, if he chose, to secure exemption. 
They pointed out the way he could remain 
in the service of his country and not be 
among the combat troops. The sincerity, 
the earnestness of York impressed the offi- 
cers, and they had not one but a number of 
talks in which the Scriptures were quoted to 
show the Savior's teachings "when man seeth 
the sword come upon the land." They 
brought out many facts about the war that 
the Tennessee mountaineer had not known. 

York did not take the release that lay 
within his grasp. Instead, he thumbed his 
Bible in search of passages that justified the 
use of force. 

One day, before the regiment sailed for 
France, when York's company was leaving 
the drill-field, Capt. Danford sent for him. 

[241] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

Together they went over many passages of 
the Bible which both had found. 

"If my kingdom were of this world, then 
would my servants fight." 

They were together several hours. At last 
York said: 

"All right; I'm satisfied." 

After that there was no reference to re- 
ligious objection. From the first he had seen 
the justice of the war. He now saw the 
righteousness of it. 

York's abilities as a soldier were soon re- 
vealed. He quickly qualified as a sharp- 
shooter, both as skirmisher and from the top 
of the trench. In battalion contest forma- 
tion, where the soldiers run and fall and fire, 
"shooting at moving targets," it was not diffi- 
cult for him to score eight hits out of ten 
shots, and, with a rifle that was new to him. 
This, too, over a range that began at 600 
yards and went down to 100 yards, with 

[242] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

the targets in the shape of the head and 
shoulders of a man. In these maneuvers he 
attracted the attention of his officers. 

The impressive figure of the man with 
its ever present evidence of reserve force, 
the strength of his personality, uneducated as 
he was, made him a natural leader of the 
men around him. Officers of the regiment 
have said that he would have received a pro- 
motion while in the training-camp but for 
the policy of not placing in command a man 
who might be a conscientious objector. 

The "All America" Division passed 
through England on its way to France and 
the first real fighting they had was in the St. 
Mihiel Salient. From there they went to the 
Argonne Forest, where the division was on 
the front line of the battle for twenty-six 
days and nights without relief. 

It was in the St. Mihiel Salient that 
York was made a Corporal, and when he 

[243] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

came out of the Argonne Forest he was a 
Sergeant. The armistice was signed a fort- 
night later. 

The war made York more deeply re- 
ligious. The diary he kept passed from 
simple notations about "places he had been" 
to a record of his thoughts and feelings. In 
it are many quotations from the Bible; many 
texts of sermons he heard while on the battle- 
fields of France. With the texts were brief 
notes that would recall the sermons to his 
memory. The book is really "a history" of 
his religious development. 

When he would kneel by a dying sol- 
dier he would record in his diary the talk 
he had with his comrade and would write 
the passages of Scripture that he or the dying 
man had spoken. It was upon this his in- 
terests centered. To others he left the task 
of telling of the battle's result. 

He wrote in his diary this simple story 

[244] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

of his fight with the battalion of German 
machine guns: 

"On the 7th day of October we lay in 
some little holes on the roadside all day. 
That night we went out and stayed a little 
while and came back to our holes, the shells 
bursting all around us. I saw men just 
blown up by the big German shells which 
were bursting all around us. 

"So the order came for us to take Hill 223 
and 240 the 8th. 

"So the morning of the 8th just before 
daylight, we started for the hill at Chatel 
Chehery. Before we got there it got light 
and the Germans sent over a heavy barrage 
and also gas and we put on our gas-masks 
and just pressed right on through those shells 
and got to the top of Hill 223 to where we 
were to start over at 6:10 A.M. 

"They were to give us a barrage. The 

[245] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

time came and no barrage, and we had to go 
without one. So we started over the top at 
6:10 A.M. and the Germans were putting 
their machine guns to working all over the 
hill in front of us and on our left and right. 
I was in support and I could see my pals 
getting picked off until it almost looked like 
there was none left. 

"So 17 of us boys went around on the left 
flank to see if we couldn't put those guns out 
of action. 

"So when we went around and fell in be- 
hind those guns we first saw two Germans 
with Red Cross band on their arms. 

"Some one of the boys shot at them and 
they ran back to our right. 

"So we all ran after them, and when we 
jumped across a little stream of water that 
was there, there was about 15 or 20 Germans 
jumped up and threw up their hands and 
said, 'Comrade.' The one in charge of us 

[246] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

boys told us not to shoot, they were going to 
give up anyway. 

^'By this time the Germans from on the 
hill was shooting at me. Well I was giving 
them the best I had. 

^'The Germans had got their machine 
guns turned around. 

"They killed 6 and wounded 3. That just 
left 8 and then we got into it right. So we 
had a hard battle for a little while. 

"I got hold of a German major and he 
told me if I wouldn't kill any more of them 
he would make them quit firing. 

"So I told him all right. If he would do 
it now. 

"So he blew a little whistle and they quit 
shooting and came down and gaVe up. I 
had about 80 or 90 Germans there. 

"They disarmed and we had another line 
of Germans to go through to get out. So I 
called for my men and one answered me 

[247] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

from behind a big oak tree and the other 
men were on my right in the brush. 

^'So I said, ^Let's get these Germans out 
of here.' One of my men said, ^It's impos- 
sible.' So I said, ^No, let's get them out of 
here.' 

^When my men said that this German 
major said, ^How many have you got?' 

"And I said, ^I got a plenty,' and pointed 
my pistol at him all the time. 

"In this battle I was using a rifle or a 45 
Colt automatic pistol. 

"So I lined the Germans up in a line of 
twos and I got between the ones in front and 
I had the German major before me. So I 
marched them right straight into those other 
machine guns, and I got them. When I got 
back to my Major's P. C. I had 132 
prisoners. 

"So you can see here in this case of mine 

here God helped me out. I had been liv- 

[248] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

ing for God and working in church work 
sometime before I came to the army. I 
am a witness to the fact that God did help 
me out of that hard battle for the bushes 
were shot off all around me and I never got 
a scrach. 

"So you can see that God will be with 
you if you will only trust Him, and I say 
He did save me." 

*^By this time," he wrote, "the Germans 
from on the hill was shooting at me. Well, 
I was giving them the best I had." 

That best was the courage to stand his 
ground and fight it out with them, regardless 
of their number, for they were the defilers of 
civilization, murderers of men, the enemies 
of fair play who had shown no quarter to 
his pals who were slain unwarned while in 
the act of granting mercy to men in their 
power. 

[249] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

That best was the morale of the soldier 
who believes that justice is on his side and 
that the justness of God will shield him 
from harm. 

And in physical qualities, it included a 
heart that was stout and a brain that was 
clear — a mind that did not weaken when all 
the hilltop above flashed in a hostile blaze, 
when the hillside rattled with the death 
drum-beat of machine gun-fire and while 
the very air around him was filled with dart- 
ing lead. As he fought, his mind visualized 
the tactics of the enemy in the moves they 
made, and whether the attack upon him was 
with rifle or machine gun, hand-grenade or 
bayonet, he met it with an unfailing marks- 
manship that equalized the disparity in 
numbers. 

Another passage in his direct and simple 
story shows the character of this man who 
came from a distant recess of the mountains 

[250] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

with no code of ethics except a confidence in 
his fellow man. 

Those of the Americans who were not 
killed or wounded in the first machine gun- 
fire had saved themselves as York had done. 
They had dived into the brush and lay flat 
upon the ground, behind trees, among the 
prisoners, protected by any obstruction they 
could find, and the stream of bullets passed 
over them. 

York was at the left, beyond the edge of 
the thicket. The others were shut off by the 
underbrush from a view of the German ma- 
chine guns that were firing on them. York 
had the open of the slope of the hill, and it 
fell to him to fight the fight. He wrote in 
his diary when he could find time, and the 
story was written in "fox-holes" in the 
Forest of Argonne, in the evenings after the 
American soldiers had dug in. Tho his rec- 
ords were for no one but himself, he had no 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

thought that raised his performance of duty 
above that of his comrades : 

"They killed 6 and wounded 3. That just 
left 8 and we got into it right. So we had a 
hard battle for a little while." 

Yet, in the height of the fight, not a shot 
was fired but by York. 

In their admiration for him and his re- 
markable achievement, so that the honor 
should rest where it belonged, the members 
of the American patrol who were the sur- 
vivors of the fight made affidavits that ac- 
counted for all of them who were not killed 
or wounded, and showed the part each took. 
These affidavits are among the records of 
Lieut. Col. G. Edward Buxton, Jr., Official 
Historian of the Eighty-Second Division. 
At the time of the fight Sergeant York was 
still a Corporal. 

From the affidavit by Private Patrick 
Donohue: 

[252] 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

"During the shooting, I was guarding the mass of 
Germans taken prisoners and devoted my attention to 
watching them. When we first came in on the 
Germans, I fired a shot at them before they surrendered. 
Afterwards I was busy guarding the prisoners and did 
not shoot. I could only see Privates Wills, Sacina and 
Sok. They were also guarding prisoners as I was 
doing." 

From the affidavit by Private Michael A. 
Sacina: 

**I was guarding the prisoners with my rifle and bay- 
onet on the right flank of the group of prisoners. I was 
so close to these prisoners that the machine gunners 
could not shoot at me without hitting their own men. 
This I think saved me from being hit. During the 
firing, I remained on guard watching these prisoners 
and unable to turn around and fire myself for this 
reason. I could not see any of the other men in my 
detachment. From this point I saw the German captain 
and had aimed my rifle at him when he blew his whistle 
for the Germans to stop firing. I saw Corporal York, 
who called out to us, and when we all joined him, I saw 
seven Americans beside myself. These were Corp. 
York, Privates Beardsley, Donohue, Wills, Sok, John- 
son and Konotski." 

From the affidavit by Private Percy 
Beardsley: 

"I was at first near Corp. York, but soon after 
thought it would be better to take to cover behind a 

[253] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

large tree about fifteen paces in rear of Corp. York. 
Privates Dymowski and Waring were on each side of 
me and both were killed by machine gun-fire. I saw 
Corp. York fire his pistol repeatedly in front of me. I 
saw Germans who had been hit fall down. I saw the 
German prisoners who were still in a bunch together 
waving their hands at the machine gunners on the hill 
as if motioning for them to go back. Finally the fire 
stopped and Corp. York told me to have the prisoners 
fall in columns of two's and take my place in the rear." 

From the afBdavit by Private George W. 
Wills: 

"When the heavy firing from the machine guns com- 
menced, I was guarding some of the German prisoners. 
During this time I saw only Privates Donohue, Sacina, 
Beardsley and Muzzi. Private Swanson was right near 
me when he was shot. I closed up very close to the 
Germans with my bayonet on my rifle and prevented 
some of them who tried to leave the bunch and get into 
the bushes from leaving. I knew my only chance was to 
keep them together and also keep them between me and 
the Germans who were shooting. I heard Corp. York 
several times shouting to the machine gunners on the hill 
to come down and surrender, but from where I stood 
I could not see Corp. York. I saw him, however, when 
the firing stopped and he told us to get along sides of 
the column. I formed those near me in columns of 



[254 



I 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

The report which the officers of the 
Eighty- Second Division made to General 
Headquarters contained these statements : 

"The part which Corporal York individu- 
ally played in this attack (the capture of the 
Decauville Railroad) is difficult to estimate. 
Practically unassisted, he captured 132 Ger- 
mans (three of whom were officers), took 
about 35 machine guns and killed no less 
than 25 of the enemy, later found by others 
on the scene of York's extraordinary exploit. 

"The story has been carefully checked in 
every possible detail from Headquarters of 
this Division and is entirely substantiated. 

"Altho Corporal York's statement tends 
to underestimate the desperate odds which 
he overcame, it has been decided to forward 
to higher authority the account given in his 
own words. 

''The success of this assault had a far- 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

reaching effect in relieving the enemy pres- 
sure against American forces in the heart of 
the Argonne Forest." 

In decorating Sergeant York with the 
Croix de Guerre with Palm, Marshal Foch 
said to him: 

"What you did was the greatest thing ac- 
complished by any private soldier of all of 
the armies of Europe." 

When the ofBcers of York's regiment 
were securing the facts for their report to 
General Headquarters and were recording 
the stories of the survivors, York was ques- 
tioned on his efforts to escape the onslaught 
of the machine guns: 

"By this time, those of my men who were 
left had gotten behind trees, and the men 
sniped at the Boche. But there wasn't any 
tree for me, so I just sat in the mud and 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

used my rifle, shooting at the machine 
gunners." 

The officers recall his quaint and mem- 
orable answer to the inquiry on the tactics 
he used to defend himself against the Boche 
who were in the gun-pits, shooting at him 
from behind trees and crawling for him 
through the brush. His method was simple 
and effective: 

"When I seed a German, I jes' tetched 
him off." 

In the afternoon of October 8 — York had 
brought in his prisoners by 10 o'clock in the 
morning — in the seventeenth hour of that 
day, the Eighty-Second Division cut the De- 
cauville Railroad and drove the Germans 
from it. The pressure against the American 
forces in the heart of the Argonne Forest 
was not only relieved, but the advance of 
the division had aided in the relief of the 
"Lost Battalion" under the command of the 

[ 257 ] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

late Col. Whittlesey, which had made its 
stand in another hollow of those hills only 
a short distance from the hillside where Ser- 
geant York made his fight. 

As the Eighty-Second Division swept up 
the three hills across the valley from Hill 
No. 223, the hill on the left— York's Hill- 
was found cleared of the enemy and there 
was only the wreckage of the battle that had 
been fought there. 

York's fight occurred on the eighth day of 
the twenty-eight day and night battle of the 
Eighty-Second Division in the Argonne. 
They were in the forest fighting on, when the 
story went over the world that an American 
soldier had fought and captured a battalion 
of German machine gunners. 

Even military men doubted its possibility, 
until the "All America" Division came out 
of the forest with the records they had made 
upon the scene, and with the clear exposi- 



SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY 

tion of the tactics and the remarkable brav- 
ery and generalship that made Sergeant 
York's achievement possible. 

Alvin York faced a new experience. He 
found himself famous. 



[259] 



yii 

TWO MORE 
DEEDS OF 
DISTINCTION 




VII 

Two More Deeds of Distinction 

LVIN was not prepared for the 
ovations that awaited him. The 
world gives generously to those 
who succeed in an extraordinary endeavor 
where the resource and ability of men are in 
competition. For intellectual achievement 
there is deference and wonder, for moral 
accomplishment there is approbation and 
love, but for physical courage there are all 
of these and an added admiration that bursts 
in such fervor of approval that men shout 
and toss their caps in air. It has been true, 
since the world began. 

The first honors came to him from his 
soldier associates. Then the men of other 
regiments, and the regiments of other na- 
tions, wanted to see the American who 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

single-handed had fought and forced a bat- 
talion of machine gunners to come to him. 
The people of France, too, were calling for 
him. 

It was with a military yardstick the sol- 
diers measured the deed, for they knew the 
fighting competency of a single machine gun 
and had seen the destructive power of the 
scythe-like sweep of a battalion of them. 
The civilian, in doubt and wonder, realized 
the magnitude of the achievement in visual- 
izing the number of prisoners that had sur- 
rendered to one man. 

The only contact Alvin York had had to 
the role of a man of prominence was to 
stand in line, at attention, as persons of im- 
portance passed before him. But when-'his 
regiment came out of the Argonne Forest, 
where its almost unbroken battle had lasted 
twenty-eight days, he was taken from the 
line and passed in review before the soldiers 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

of other regipients. Under orders from 
headquarters of the American Expedition- 
ary Force he traveled through the war zone. 
As a guest of honor he was sent to cities in 
southern France. In Paris he was received 
with impressive ceremonies by President 
Poincare and the government officials. It 
was during this period that many of the mili- 
tary awards were made to him, and brigade 
reviews were selected as the occasions for his 
decoration. 

Against this background of enthusiasm, 
the tall, reserved, silent mountaineer, in nat- 
ural repose, moved through the varying pro- 
grams of a day. As all was new to him, he 
complied with almost childlike docility to 
the demands upon him, but he was ever 
watchful that his conduct should conform to 
that of those around him. If called upon to 
speak, he responded; and he stood before the 
cheering crowds in noticeable mental con- 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

trol. The few words he used did not mis- 
fire nor jam. They ended in a smile of real 
fellowship that beamed from a rugged face 
that was furrowed and tanned, and always 
with the quaint mountain phrase of appreci- 
ation, *'I thank ye!" In the months he re- 
mained with the army in France he grew 
in personal popularity from his unaffected 
bearing. 

The letters written home to his mother 
during this period show him basically un- 
changed. 

These letters, usually two a week, were the 
same as those he had been writing all the 
while. In them were but few references to 
himself. Even in the privacy of his corre- 
spondence with his home, there was not a 
boastful thought over a thing that he had 
done, and only the vaguest reference to the 
homage paid to him, as tho it were all a 
part of a soldier's life. It was only through 

[266] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

others that the mother learned of the honors 
given to her son in France. 

At the beginning of each letter he quieted 
his mother's forebodings for him, and he 
turned to inquiries about home. Out of his / 
pay of $30 a month as a private soldier he ^ 
had assigned $25 of it to his mother. He J 
wanted to know that the remittances had 
reached her. Two brothers had married and 
moved away. Henry, the eldest, was living 
in Idaho, and Albert in Kentucky. He 
wanted news of them. Two other married 
brothers, Joe and Sam, while still living in 
the valley, were not at the old home. He 
wanted every detail about their crops that 
told of their welfare. 

His most valuable personal possession w as 
two mules. Were George and Jim and 
Robert, the younger brothers, keeping those 
mules fat? How much of the farm were 
they preparing to ^'put in corn''? Corn was 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

sure to be scarce and would be worth $2.50 
by harvest time ! Was Mrs. Embry Wright, 
his only married sister, staying with his 
mother to comfort her? Were Lilly and 
Lucy, his little sisters, still helping her with 
the hard work — of course they were! And 
in every letter there was an inquiry about 
the sweetheart he had left behind. 

The mother, when each letter had been 
read, placed it upright on the board shelf 
which was the mantel of the family fireplace. 
When a new letter came she took down the 
old one and put it carefully away. So there 
was always "some news from Alvin" which 
was accessible to all the neighbors. 

'Will" Wright, president of the Bank of 
Jamestown, received the first printed story 
that gave any description of the fight Alvin 
had "put up" in the Forest of Argonne, and 
Mr. Wright hurried to Mrs. York with it. 
With the family gathered around her in that 

[268] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

hut in the mountains, and with tears running 
down her expectant face, she learned for the 
first time what her boy had done. She made . 
Mr. Wright read the story — not once, but ) 
seven times. 

America was ready for Sergeant York 
when among the returning soldiers his troop- 
ship touched port — the harbor of New York 
in May, 1919. The story of the man had run 
ahead — his fight in the forest, that had added 
to the cubic stature of the American soldier; 
the artlessness of his life and the genuineness 
of his character, which as yet showed no 
alloy; the modest, becoming acceptance of 
illustrious honors paid to him in France. 
The people saw in this simple, earnest moun- 
taineer the type of American that had m'ade 
America. They thought of him as coming 
from that stratum of clay that could be 
molded into a rail-splitter and, when the 
need arose, remodeled into the nation's 

[^1 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

leader. And quickly and unexpectedly, Ser- 
geant York was destined to show by two 
other deeds, prompted by an inborn emi- 
nence, that the esteem was not misplaced. 

In New York and Washington there were 
receptions and banquets in his honor, and 
around him gathered high officials of the 
army and navy and the Government, and 
men who were leaders in civilian life. It 
was with impetuous enthusiasm that the 
people crowded the sidewalks to greet him 
as he passed along the streets — the worn 
service uniform, the color of his hair, the 
calm face that showed exposure to stress and 
hardships, set in the luxurious leathers of an 
automobile, surrounded by men so different 
in personal attire and appearance, marked 
him as the man they sought. There is some- 
thing in the man that creates the desire in 
others to express outwardly their approval 
of him. At the New York Stock Exchange 

[270] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

business was suspended as the members rode 
him upon their shoulders over the floor of 
the Exchange where visitors are not allowed. 
In Washington the House of Representatives 
stopped debate and the members arose and 
cheered him when he appeared in the 
gallery. 

There were ovations for him at the rail- 
road stations along his way to Fort Ogle- 
thorpe, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, where 
he was mustered out of service. 

And in the midst of all of these mental- 
distracting demonstrations Alvin York was 
put to the test. He was offered a contract 
that guaranteed him $75,000 to appear in 
a moving picture play that would be staged 
in the Argonne in France and would tell the 
story of his mountain life. There was 
another proposition of $50,000. There 
were offers of vaudeville and theatrical en- 
gagements that ranged up to $1,000 a week, 

[271] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

and totaled many thousands. On these his 
decision was reached on the instant they were 
offered. The theater was condemned by the 
tenets of his church, and all through his 
youth the ministers of the gospel, whom he 
had heard, preached against it. The theater 
in any form was, as he saw it, against the 
principles of religion to which he had made 
avowal. 

Then up to the surface among those who 
were crowding around him there wormed 
men who saw in Sergeant York's popularity 
the opportunity for them to make money for 
themselves. Some of the propositions that 
were made to him were sound, some whim- 
sical, others strangely balanced upon a busi- 
ness idea — but back of all of them ran the 
same motive. The past in Sergeant York's 
life had been filled with hard work and 
hardships, the present was new, the future 
uncharted, but to him there was something 

[272] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

in the voices of the people who were ac- 
claiming him that was not for sale. 

When he left Fort Oglethorpe for his 
home, the people of his mountain country, 
in automobiles, on horseback, upon mules, 
whole families riding in chairs in the beds of 
farm wagons, met him along the roadway as 
he traveled the forty-eight miles over the 
mountains from the railroad station to Pall 
Mall, and they formed a procession as they 
wound their way toward the valley. 

Only a few months before, when Alvin 
had returned home on a furlough which he 
secured while in training at Camp Gordon, 
he had "picked up" a wagon ride over the 
thirty-six miles from the railroad station to 
Jamestown, and had walked the twelve 
miles from "Jimtown" to Pall Mall, carry- 
ing his grip. 

His mother was among those who met 
him at Jamestown. They rode together, 

1^73] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

and the last of the long shadows had faded 
from the "Valley of the Three Forks o' 
the Wolf" when they reached their cabin 
home. 

The next morning, while it was not yet 
noon, the Sergeant and Miss Gracie 
Williams met on "the big road" near the 
Rains' store. Those sitting on the store 
porch — and there was to be but little work 
done on the farms that day — saw the two 
meet, bow and pass on. Pall Mall is but 
little given to gossip. Yet there was a strange 
story to be carried back to the woman-folk in 
the homes in the valley and on the moun- 
tainsides. 

Only the foxhound, that moved slowly 
behind his newly returned master, knew of 
an earlier meeting that day between Ser- 
geant York and his sweetheart, and of a walk 
down a tree-shaded path that had given the 
hound time to explore every fence-rail cor- 

L274] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

ner and verify his belief that nothing worth 
while had been along that road for days. 

But a quiet, uneventful life in the valley 
was not to return to Sergeant York. 

The Sunday following was Tennessee's 
Decoration Day. From the mountains for 
miles around the people came to Pall Mall. 
During the ceremonies, while the flowers 
were being placed upon the graves in the 
little cemetery, they wanted Alvin to talk 
to them. He and Gracie were seated in the 
empty bed of an unhitched wagon down at 
the edge of the grove of forest trees that 
surrounds the church. He came to the 
cemetery, and his talk was the untram- 
melled outpouring of his heart for all that 
had been done for him. The spirit of the 
day, with his own people around him, his 
experiences and the changes that had come 
into his life since the last decoration ser- 
vices he had attended there, seemed to 

[ 275 ] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

move him deeply, and here was first dis- 
played a power of oratory which he was 
so rapidly to develop. 

The people of Tennessee began to gather 
gifts for him before he left France, and the 
Tennessee Society of New York City enter- 
tained him when he left his troop-ship. The 
people of the South had always remembered 
with added reverence that Robert E. Lee 
had declined to commercialize his military 
^ame, while some of the other generals of 

(the Confederacy had sacrificed their repu- 
tations upon the altar of expediency. So 
when it became known that Sergeant York, 
with no knowledge of history to guide him, 

)but acting from principle, had refused to 
capitalize the record of the few brief months 
he had spent in the service of his country, 
there was nothing within the gift of the 
people he could not have had. 

His welcome home by the State of Ten- 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

nessee was to be held at the capital on June 
9th. But Sergeant York, before he went to 
war, had given an option — one over which 
he was showing deep concern. His moun- 
tain sweetheart was to "have him for the 
taking when he got back." So it was mutu- 
ally — amicably — arranged that the fore- 
closure proceedings should take place in 
Pall Mall on June 7th, and their bridal tour 
would be to Nashville. 

It was an out-of-door wedding so that all 
of the guests in Pall Mall for that day could 
be present, and they came not only from all 
parts of Tennessee but from neighboring 
States. The altar was the rock ledge on the 
mountainside, above the spring, under the 
beech trees that arched their boughs into a 
verdant cathedral dome. It had been their 
meeting-place when he was an unknown 
mountain boy and she a golden-haired 
school-girl. As the sunlight flickered on the 

[^77] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

trunks of those trees it showed scars of knife 
carvings that carried the dates of other 
meetings there. 

The swaying boughs were draped with 
flags and flowers. The ceremony was per- 
formed by Governor Roberts of Tennessee, 
assisted by Rev. Rosier Pile, the pastor of the 
church in the valley, and Rev. W. T. Hag- 
gard, chaplain-general of the Governor's 
staff. The bridesmaids were Miss Ida 
Wright, Miss Maud Brier and Miss Adelia 
Darwin, and Sergeant York's best man was 
Sergeant Clay Brier, of Jamestown. Their 
friendship had been proved upon the fields 
of France. The wedding march was the 
wind among the laurels and the pines. 

The * Welcome Home" for him, at Nash- 
ville, by the people of Tennessee, will long 
be remembered among the public demon- 
strations of the State. Tennessee has always 
been proud of the fact that the conduct of 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

her sons in those times when the nation went 
to war had entitled her to the name of ''The 
Volunteer State." That one of her sons 
should come back from the World War, 
having done, in the sum of its accomplish- 
ment, that which the Commander of the 
Armies of the Allies called the greatest feat 
of valor, while fighting solely on his own re- 
sources, of any soldier of all of the armies of 
Europe, made the welcome one that sprang 
joyously from the hearts of the people. And 
that this soldier, while poor and still facing 
the possibility of a life filled with the depri- 
vation of poverty, with no assurance but the 
continued labor of his hands, should turn 
down the offers of fortunes because, to him, 
they were prompted by a motive that was 
unworthy — opened the very inner sanctuary 
of their hearts and the people came with 
gifts, that he should sustain no loss of oppor- 
tunity and should never be in need. The 

[279] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

offerings were not in money. They were 
presents from the people. There were fer- 
tile acres that he could till, as that was his 
selection of the life he wished to follow. 
There was a model, modern house in which 
he could live, and furnishings for it. There 
were blooded fowls and stock and farming 
implements, down to the files for his scythe. 
The donors were individuals, organizations 
and communities. Waiting for him was the 
state's medal which bears the device ^'Service 
Above Self." He was appointed a member 
of the Governor's staff and upon him was 
conferred the rank of Colonel. This was 
the wedding trip of Sergeant York and his 
bride. 

To Nashville, in the bridal party, to see 
and hear the honors to be paid her son went 
Mrs. York, the mother. It was the first time 
she had ever seen a railroad-train. And, 
now, it was Mrs. York's turn. She, too, 




"Before Sergeant York went to war he had given an option to his 
mountain sweetheart— she could have him for the takin' when he 
got back." 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

faced a battalion. Wearing her calico sun- 
bonnet she came suddenly upon the gorgeous 
social battalion — so fully equipped with the 
bayonets of class and the machine guns of 
curiosity. And she captured it! As her son 
had never seen the man or crowd of men of 
whom he was afraid, she, with her philos- 
ophy of life, looked upon every one as 
worthy of friendship and the meeting with 
them a pleasure and not an occasion for dis- 
concertment. If they approached her with 
a greeting of wit, her answer was quick and 
gentle, and as playful as a mountain stream. 
If their mood was serious, she immediately 
impressed them with her frankness and her 
cornmon sense. She went everywhere the 
program provided, and enjoyed every mo- 
ment of it. As she was preparing to return 
home her appreciation was expressed in her 
declaration that she "intended to come again, 
w^hen she could go quietly about and really 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

see things — ^when policemen would not have 
to make way for her." 

Alvin was beginning life anew, decorated 
with the Distinguished Service Cross and 
the rare Congressional Medal of Honor, the 
highest award of his country to a soldier; 
the Medaille Militaire and the Croix de 
Guerre with Palm, of France; the Croca di 
Guerra, of Italy; the War Medal of Monte- 
negro ; the Legion of Honor ; medals for gal- 
lantry from Tennessee and the Methodist 
Centenary, and the Commonwealth of 
Rhode Island was beckoning to him, to dec- 
orate him with the medal the State's legisla- 
ture had voted. There were the gifts the 
people of Tennessee had given him, and 
others that began to come from all sections 
of the Union. The mountaineers of the 
State of Georgia clubbed together and sent 
a remembrance — and presents came from 
the far West. 

[282] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

Several cities offered him a home if he 
would come to live among their people. 
Communities, wanting him, selected their 
most desirable farming sites and tendered 
them. But the "Valley of the Three Forks o' 
the Wolf" was home to him, and while in 
France he had said he wished to live "no- 
where but at Pall Mall." So the Rotary 
Clubs, headed by the Nashville organiza- 
tion, raised the fund for the "York Home" 
through public subscription, and there has 
been given to him four hundred acres of the 
"bottom land" of the Valley of the Wolf and 
one of the timbered mountainsides — land 
that had been homesteaded and first brought 
into cultivation by "Old Coonrod" File, his 
pioneer ancestor — land that had remained in 
the possession of his family until lost in the 
vicissitudes of the days following the Civil 
War. 

As his residence on his new farm was yet 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

to be built for him, he carried his bride back 
to the valley and to the little two-room cabin 
that had been his mother's and his home. 

It was impossible for Sergeant York to 
accept all of the invitations he received to 
visit cities and address conventions, and he 
had often to disappoint delegations who 
traveled the long, rough mountain road to 
urge in person his acceptance. And he 
could not, with a slow-moving pen upon a 
table of pine, answer all the communications 
that came. Before the war two letters for 
him in half a year was an occasion worthy 
of comment. Now each day, over the moun- 
tains upon a pacing roan, the postman came, 
and the mail-pouches, swung as saddle-bags, 
swayed in unison with the horse's step. Most 
of the letters were for the York home. 

The public mind pays tribute to its heroes 
in ways that are odd. In the growing mass 
of mail that was kept In a wide wooden box 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

under the bed — letters that in number "had 
got away" from the Sergeant's ability to an- 
swer — there were displayed' many mental 
idiosyncrasies and an abundance of advice, 
and there were many strange requests. Some 
of them were pathetic begging letters, as tho 
the Sergeant were a rich man; some came 
from prison-cells, asking his influence to 
secure a pardon; some from those still de- 
sirous of securing a business partnership 
with him. Among them were even be- 
lated matrimonial proposals, describing the 
writers' attractive qualities. These the big 
Sergeant teasingly turned over ^to the 
golden-haired girl who, herself, had come 
but recently into that home, and they may 
safely be classed among those letters the 
Sergeant could never answer. 

While he was at home, which was now 
only for brief intervals between trips in an- 
swer to the invitations he had accepted, it 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

was noted that he was unusually quiet. 
Often he would sit for an hour or more upon 
the door-step, looking out past the arbor of 
honeysuckle, over the acres of land that had 
been given him, gazing on to the mountains. 
But he kept his own counsel. Some of those 
who lived in the valley, who saw him sitting^ 
thinking, wondered if there had come a 
longing into Alvin's heart to be out in the 
world again. 

But his problem was far from that. He 
had asked himself two questions : "What was 
the great need of the people who live far 
back in the mountains?" "What — since the 
world had been so generous to him, and 
lifted from his shoulders the trials of living 
— could he do for his people?" He was try- 
ing to answer them. Subconsciously, a great 
and a genuine appreciation of all that had 
been done for him was pushing him onward. 

Unaided, he had solved the first. It was 

[286] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

education. How keenly, within the few 
months that had passed, had he realized his 
own need! 

But at that time he did not appreciate how 
rapidly he was building for himself a bridge 
over that shortcoming. 

The second ^problem he found more diffi- 
cult. He recognized he could do a greater 
good and his efforts would be more lasting 
and far-reaching if he proved to be an aid 
to the younger generation. In his effort to 
reach a practical plan he went as far as he 
could, with his limited knowledge of organi- 
zation, before he sought counsel. 

Then he asked that no other gifts be made 
to him, but instead the money be contributed 
to a fund to build simple, primary schools 
throughout the mountain districts where 
there were no state or county tax appropria- 
tions available for the purpose. Of the fund, 
not a dollar was to be for his personal use. 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

nor for any effort he might put forth in its 
behalf. 

So again the form of Sergeant York rose 
out of the valley, above the mountains, and 
the sunlight of the nation's approval fell 
upon it. Men of prominence volunteered to 
aid him in his efforts for the children of the 
mountains, and the result was the incorpo- 
ration of the York Foundation, a non-profit- 
sharing organization, that is to build school- 
houses and operate schools. Among the trus- 
tees are an ex-Secretary of the United States 
Treasury, bishops of the churches, a state 
governor, a congressman, bankers, lav^yers 
and business men.* The fund is already a 

♦The Trustees of the York Foundation are: Bishop James 
Atkins, Methodist Episcopal Church, South; W. B. Beau- 
champ, Director-General of the Methodist Centenary, Nash- 
ville, Tenn. ; George E. Bennie, President, Alexander Bennie 
Co., Nashville, Tenn.; C. H. Brandon, President, Brandon 
Printing Co., Nashville, Tenn.; P. H. Cain, Cain-Sloan Co., 
Nashville, Tenn.; Joel O. Cheek, President, Cheek-Neal 
Coffee Co., Nashville, Tenn.; James N. Cox, Gainesboro 
Telephone Co., Cookeville, Tenn. ; Dr. G. W. Dyer, Vander- 
bilt University, Nashville, Tenn.; Judge F. T. Fancher, 
Sparta, Tenn.; Edgar M. Foster, Business Manager, "Nash- 
ville Banner," Nashville, Tenn.; Judge Joseph Garden- 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

substantial one, steadily growing, and suc- 
cess is assured. 

In connection with each school is to be 
land to be tilled by the students as a farm, 
and besides providing instruction in agricul- 
ture, the farm is to aid in the support of the 
school, and no child of the community is to 
miss the opportunity to attend through in- 
ability to pay the tuition charge. As each 
unit becomes self-supporting, another school 
is to be established in a new district. 

hire, Carthage, Tenn. ; T. Graham Hall, Business Man, Nash- 
ville, Tenn, ; Hon. Cordell Hull^ Chairman of Democratic 
National Committee anch-ftrrfiTEr' Congressman from York's 
district; Lee J. Loventhal, Business Man, Nashville, Tenn.; 
Hon. William G. McAdoo, former secretary of the United 
States Treasury, New.York City; Hon. Hill McAllister, State 
Treasurer, Nashville, Tenn.; J. 8. McHenry, Vice-President, 
Fourth & First National Bank, Nashville, Tenn.; Dr. Bruce 
R. Payne, President, George Peabody College for Teachers, 
Nashville, Tenn.; Rev. R. C. Pile, Pall Mall, Tenn.; T. R. 
Preston, President, Hamilton National Bank, Chattanooga, 
Tenn. ; Hon. A. H. Roberts, former Governor of Tennessee, 
Nashville, Tenn.; Bolton Smith, Lawyer, Memphis, Tenn.; 
Judge C. E. Snodgrass, Crossville, Tenn.; Dr. James L 
Vance, First Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tenn,; Hon. 
George N, Welch, former State Commissioner of Public 
Utilities, Nashville, Tenn.; F. A. Williams, Farmer, Pall 
Mall, Tenn.;S. R Williams, Farmer, Pall Mall, Tenn.; W. 
L. Wright, President, Bank of Jamestown, Pall Mall, Tenn., 
and Sergeant Alvin C. York. 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

In this new endeavor, Alvin wished to do 
what he could to shield the boys now at play 
among the red brush upon the mountain- 
sides from being compelled to say, after they 
had grown to young manhood, what he him- 
self had been forced to confess : "I'm just an 
ignorant mountain boy." 

And he is making rapid strides of progress 
for himself. I saw him enter the great ban- 
quet room of a leading hotel in one of the 
country's largest cities. The hall was filled 
with men and women of refinement and cul- 
ture. As Sergeant York and his young wife 
entered, the banqueters arose and cheered 
them. This demonstration was a welcome to 
"Sergeant York, the soldier." 

He paused, with a smile of appreciation 
as he looked over the vast assemblage, and he 
bowed with a grace and dignity far beyond 
that which was expected of him from what 
his audience had read and heard. Then with- 

[290] 



TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION 

out turning his head, he reached for the hand 
of his bride and led her to the speakers' 
table upon a raised platform. And he was 
again to bring that assemblage to its feet and 
fill that hall with its cheers. This time it 
was for Alvin York, the man — as he talked 
to them about the boys of the mountains. 

Three days afterward, he entered the store 
of John Marion Rains at Pall Mall. As all 
the chairs and kegs of horseshoes were oc- 
cupied, he put his hands behind him, swung 
himself to a place of comfort upon the coun- 
ter, and took his part in the battle of wit as 
the firing flashed amid the tobacco smoke. 
Pall Mall was home, and there he per- 
mitted no distinction between individuals. 

This has wandered far afield as a biogra- 
phy of Sergeant York. It is but a story of 
the strength and the simplicity of a man — a 
young man — whom the nation has honored 

[291] 



SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE 

for what he has done, with something in it 
of those who went before and left him as a 
legacy the qualities of mind and heart that 
enabled him to fight his fight in the Forest 
of Argonne. The biography no doubt will 
be written later. He has not planned for the 
long years that lie ahead, but is following 
after a principle with a force that can not be 
deflected or checked. The future alone will 
tell where this is to lead him. This is really 
a story of but two years of his life — the 
period of time that has elapsed since Alvin 
York first found himself — a period in which 
he has done three things, and any one of 
them would have marked him for distinc- 
tion. He fought a great fight, declined to 
barter the honors that came to him, and 
using his new-found strength he has reached 
a helping hand to the children of the moun- 
tains who needed him. 

PALM AM QUI MERUIT FERAT! 
[292] 




"Back again at his home in the 'Valley of the Three Forks o' the 
Wolf he asked that the people give him no more gifts, but instead 
contribute the money to a fund to build simple, primary schools for 
the children of the mountains who had no schools. Of the fund 
not a dollar was to be for his personal use, nor for any effort he 
might put forth in its behalf." 



.u 



(fi. 



Q 



66 



(^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 131 830 5 









wmm 



1 



fl<l! M 



..>! U.1H. 



Mill 



i 



lii 






f 

, iiii 
m 



I 



liiiii 



I'm. 

ill!!! 



I 



Nl*l 






ill'. 



! 1 






i I 1 ! 



